EURIS (European River Information Services System) – The Central European RIS Platform

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

AbstractThe development and implementation of the River Information Services (RIS) concept started in the end 1990s with various research projects followed by national or regional implementation projects in the first decade of this century. The resulting national RIS systems haven’t been able to exploit the full potential of RIS when it comes to cross-border data exchange and interoperability. To overcome these gaps the concept of RIS Corridor Management was established aiming at linking the fragmented services together on a corridor to supply RIS along the complete route or network. The concept of RIS Corridor Management was taken up by the CEF (Connecting Europe Facility Programme) co-funded multi-beneficiary project RIS COMEX (www.riscomex.eu) with the goal to implement harmonized RIS services on European level. Within the RIS COMEX project the consortium of 13 countries realized a common and centralized single access point to Inland Waterway Information, the European River Information Services (EuRIS) System. EuRIS acts as European RIS platform fulfilling a great variety of information needs of inland waterway stakeholders like skippers, vessel and infrastructure operators, logistics and authorities. The system gathers relevant RIS information from the national systems in order to provide optimized fairway-, infrastructure- and traffic-related services in a single point of access for the users enabling reliable route- and voyage planning and sharing as well as traffic- and transport management on pan-European level. EuRIS provides access to its services via a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) or machine-readable Open Application Programming Interfaces (API).In order to guarantee sustainable operation of EuRIS a legal, organizational and financial framework has been setup by the partners. The core aspects concern the joint governance of the system operation as well as the legal basis for RIS data exchange and usage. The full operation and further development of EuRIS is a major milestone in the sector enhancing attractiveness and competitiveness of Inland Waterway Transport in Europe and setting the basis for connectivity to other transport modes and synchro modal logistic operations.