Freight transport telematics architecture. Final Report

The national architecture system is a reference architecture through which the Ministry of Transport and Communications supports the national development of the transport telematics, estimates the usefulness of the individual projects and monitors how the architecture is followed. The freight transport telematics architecture is a part of the horizontal project area of the FITS programme "Prerequisites for ITS services". The objective of the architecture is to provide the opportunity to improve the organisation's competitive ability on the market in the form of more efficient operations, a more versatile service supply or better compatibility. The architecture describes open interfaces between the actors without binding them to specific technologies and without intervening in the internal systems of companies. An organisation can compare its present operations with a national vision of the target conditions as a starting point for development of its operations, actor-specific architecture or individual systems. The time horizon is at least 10 years and the central parts of the architecture are 'eternal '.The viewpoint of the architecture is the freight and related information flowing through the logistics chain from sender to receiver. The architecture focuses on the processes that are directly related to the transport of goods and on the information flows of these processes. The architecture covers the different modes of transport including road, rail, water and air. The architecture has been described independent of transport mode so that the process components can be collected in actual transport chains. The architecture contains role definitions for the sender, the receiver, the logistics service providers and the public administration. The described process areas of the freight transport are planning, management and control, supply chain operations, and tracking and tracing. The information flows comprise management data, track and trace data and other data related to the goods order, transport agreement, transport order, dispatch note and load specification. The logical architecture contains the description of information objects and the information services that are based on these as well as the description of information system services. The data model has been described as an entity-relationship diagram. This relationship scheme represents the data groups and the permanent relations between them. The study identifies the deficiencies and needs of the present situation compared to the future vision. Three areas for development were defined: information infrastructure, identification and processes. The descriptions of area 8 of the European KAREN architecture describe the same problem area for road transport. The KAREN architecture descriptions have been used as a checklist for both functions and data flows. The study has been granted European Community financial aid in the field of Trans-European Networks -Transport. This report is available at http://www.vtt.fi/rte/projects/fits/ or http://www.mintc.fi