SITS: a system for uniform intermodal freight transport information exchange

Abstract Intermodal transport chains consist of many actors and it is inherently difficult for a user to obtain an insight on the real progress of their transport at any moment or to interpret the consequences of a deviation. Based upon the results of a European Union financed project a user-friendly and technologically advanced method is proposed for trip information and data, transfer and analysis. This is based upon a “Transport Transaction data set”, which includes as a “Management Summary” all essential data for the transport: i.e. the information on the planned and real locations and times of the cargo. “Coupling” of several chains is foreseen. The data is represented as a eXtended Markup Language (XML) document. This approach is less error-prone than the common strategy of distributing individual status messages about transport events relying on each party to maintain an historical record and drawing conclusions from it. The proposed system for Simple Intermodal Tracking and Tracing Solutions (SITS), is a typical example of the information aggregation needed for the next generation of distributed transport information systems. The system presented here has been developed and demonstrated in pilot form.