A New Architectural Framework for Digitalization of Maritime Intelligent Transport Systems

Abstract

: Digitization in international shipping is an increasingly important topic, but for many years, the lack of accepted international standards and the usage of many different regional solutions, especially for communication between ships and ports, has made the introduction of digitalized solutions difficul t. Since 2020, important work has been done in IMO to harmonize international standards supporting ship-port interactions, and this work has now been supported by both shipping, ports, and international standardizations organizations. IMO, through its facilitation committee (FAL) and EGDH (Expert Group on Data Harmonization) is developing the IMO Reference Data Model that covers mandatory reporting requirements related to port calls. This conceptual data model is mapped to three technical data models in three different domains, namely, UNECE (trade), WCO (customs) and ISO 28005 (maritime) to ensure the interoperability between the different I CT systems participating in the data exchange. The IMO Reference Data Model has also been extended with operational da ta to handle Just-In-Time arrival and departure and also nautical information to ensure that the specification of the locations in ports (berths, pilot boarding places, bollards etc) are the same for different usages. Several international organizations as BIMCO (the largest ship owners' organization) and international port organisations as IAPH, IPCSA and IHMA are strongly involved in this work. This paper summarizes work done by IMO and others to clarify the roles, functionalities and ICT -systems (Information and Communications Technology) that