The German Directorate-General for Waterways and Shipping (GDWS) has approved Hamburg Port Consulting (HPC), the logistics consultancy for ports, maritime, inland terminals and intermodal rail transport, to conduct a study on information services for ports and terminals.
The investigation that is being carried out as part of a European project aimed at developing a digitalisation strategy for freight transport on continental Europe’s inland waterways, according to a statement.
As the central federal authority of the Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration, the GDWS is participating in the “Digitalisation of Inland Waterways” (DIWA) project, which is funded by the European Union’s (EU) Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program and involves four other national inland waterway authorities: the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Austria.
The aim of the DIWA project is to make transport more competitive and sustainable in the long term by developing a common strategy for the digitalisation of the inland waterways of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) corridors.
“We at GDWS together with our European project partners, will be able to help shape the future of European inland waterway transport and to contribute to this environmentally friendly mode yielding an even better performance,” said Thomas Wagner, Head of Department for Inland Transport Engineering and Tobias Aretz, National DIWA Coordinator.
HPC, which has been commissioned to explore the information services for ports and terminals, will focus on building an inventory of the data inter-faces between inland navigation operators and European ports, as well as the information technology (IT) system landscape, to determine the existing level of digital maturity and the future potential of digitalisation in ports and inland navigation.
“The digital transformation of the inland waterways network will significantly increase the attractiveness of the mode for customers,” claimed Hartmut Beyer, authorised signatory at HPC.
