The EIES Project

(European Information Exchange Service

for the Communication between Harbour areas)

The project started in September 1995 and will finish at the end of October 1998. It is part of the European Commission programme ACTS (Advanced Communications Technologies & Services).

EIES aims at developing services which support routine and non-routine communication between different players within harbour areas (harbour authorities, ship-owners, customs, fire brigade...). Routine communications include the daily work communications on an internal, regional, European or international level. Non-routine communications include the management of emergency cases internal to a harbour area or between different harbours. The main objective of the project is to define, implement and experiment an advanced communication service intended for players within harbours areas in order to improve the co-operation between distributed sites (port entities, ships...).

The project has the following objectives :

• to analyse the needs and requirements of the port actors involved, depending on their economic, social and geographical situations. This analysis has been made with the help of the four European ports involved in EIES: Bordeaux (France), Bremen (Germany), Brest (France) and Santander (Spain);
• to develop, design and operate accordingly an EIES demonstrator as a prototype system, including the applications and the networking aspects;
• to deploy the EIES service on terrestrial and mobile networking technologies for ships in harbour or at sea, and for actors within harbour areas;
• to evaluate the costs and potential benefits of the service offered;
• to evaluate the manner in which the implemented applications can significantly contribute to social and economic development;
• to evaluate to which extent techno-economic obstacles can influence the development and deployment of the EIES services; and
• to identify regulatory obstacles inhibiting the introduction of the service.

The first phase of the EIES project has allowed to collect the users requirements and to elaborate the functional and technical specification of the EIES services and infrastructure. The deriving EIES concept has been to provide a system aiming at increasing the efficiency of the information distribution among the various port players, with a user-friendly and network-transparent interface.

The second phase has been the actual development of the EIES services integrated beyond this user interface. A requirement on these services was to implement a global information system building upon existing systems by providing interoperability and transparency. The overall service provides today:

• an information system for all relevant actors in the maritime area (administrative and commercial organisations) for routine and non routine communication. This distribution of multimedia information has been provided by two database applications: "Blue Pages", which provides information on port companies (address, phone numbers, contact persons...) and "Port Entry Guide" (PEG), based on already existing paper guides. This service provides Geographical Information Systems (GIS) capabilities (clickable maps of the ports) and contains logical links to the Blue Pages information;
• the possibility to use CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) tools. The CSCW services experimented within EIES have been the MBone tools and NetMeeting; these collaborative services are used particularly for the management of crisis situations in real-time and in the general decision-making process (virtual meetings);
• an automated information exchange (EDI) adapted to the dangerous cargo notification messages case, and accessed via the Web;
• an access to the information system from ships and from mobile terminals within the harbour area (via Inmarsat-HSD and Enhanced DSSR).

En annexe il faut expliquer ce que sont le Inmarsat HSD et le Enhanced DSSR

All services have been designed as an open architecture, where the requirements on security have been taken into account. Access to multimedia databases have been for example restricted to allowed people, with a login/password provision.

During the third and final phase, the EIES services have been experimented by end-users and their cost-benefit adequacy has been evaluated. This phase is currently carried on. The end users have had the occasion to experiment the above-mentioned EIES services in several working conditions (daily work for some of them, demonstration on simulated usage scenarios for others) and with different networking technologies (especially for the fixed access where ATM, ISDN and Internet have been tested).

The final results of the EIES project will be presented at the European conference MARCOM'98, organised for the third time by EIES around the theme "Information Technologies and Multimedia Services for the Maritime World". Organised on 13-14 October 1998 in Brest (France). This event intends to give an overview of current maritime initiatives carried out in Europe, and to explore how maritime projects can be integrated in the future European Commission 5^th Frame Work Programme.