Overview
The maritime regulatory landscape is ruled under a complex national and international framework.
National authorities have a responsibility to implement and enforce regulations determined at organizations such as The International Maritime Organization, and International Labor Organization, and others as European Union and European Maritime Safety Agency Also the European Union through EMSA has, somehow, a direct influence on shipping companies.
The IMO, together with the Maritime Labour Convention, has established a global legal framework to support the international regulatory regime.
The organizations depicted in the table below represent the main actors in the international regulatory framework and apply to all vessels, ensuring that all shipping companies are competing at the same level.
Europe’s “Integrated Maritime Policy” is aimed at enhancing Europe’s capacity to face the challenges of globalisation and competitiveness, climate change, degradation of the marine environment, maritime safety and security, energy security, and sustainability. The recent White Paper for Transport 2011 provides a Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area. A key dimension of this is “Optimising the performance of multimodal logistic chains, including by making greater use of inherently more resource -efficient modes”.
The key to achieving this objective is integrating maritime e-Compliance with e-Compliance for multimodal transport chains and e -Compliance for Customs. Of particular interest is the need to align regulations and exchange or retrieve data from different directorates MOVE, JLS, FISH, ENV, TAXUD and EU agencies. Therefore, all EU regulatory requirements must be fully integrated in future compliance solutions.
Currently, security compliance has a strong focus on the role of the carrier to submit in advance information on the cargo that is planned to be entered or exited from the EU borders, e.g. the Entry Summary Declaration (ENS). This makes it reasonable and relatively easy to integrate this reporting requirement with ship reporting facilities, as is the idea behind Directive 2010/65/EU. The e-Compliance systems and solutions have to be robust to future security requirements as well.
From a business perspective, shipping companies spend a large amount of resources collecting new and updated regulations each year. In addition to the cost, they often remain unsure that their system is up -to -date and those authorities in different ports agree with their interpretation of the regulations. The e -Compliance project will be aimed at addressing the goals and challenges outlined under the umbrella of the e -Maritime Framework8 to maximize benefits for both shipping business stakeholders and authorities.
e-Compliance will build upon strengths created across numerous EU projects in order to facilitate tighter integration and co-operation in the fragmented field of regulatory compliance in the maritime domain. Regulations are created by numerous different bodies, with little co-operation between them. As such, there is a significant lack of cohesion between the vast array of regulations and the possibility of conflicting regulations is very real. By creating a model for managing regulations digitally and creating services for all the different stakeholders, e-Compliance can harmonize these regulations and allow for co-operation between the different stakeholder groups. Not only will this improve the quality of regulations, but it will also reduce the burden for those having to enforce the regulations as well as those who must comply, resulting in a regulatory regime that is more effectively implemented. e-Compliance will also develop capabilities to ensure that all stakeholders are aware of the current active regulations and allow preparation for regulations that will take effect in the future.
Activities will include:
- Establishment of a cooperation model between regulation setting and enforcement authorities, both for port state control and IMO regulations, for modelling and interpreting regulations, ensuring harmonisation across national and organisational boundaries.
Demonstration of automated compliance management by:
- Modelling and delivery of regulations in electronic format
- Harmonised e-Services for more effective and coordinated enforcement controls and inspections.
- E-services in support of the class requirements, particularly on surveys and for ship risk management in upgraded e-Maritime applications.
Evaluation of the practical implementation of the above in representative networks and the provision of recommendations for e-Maritime policies
Funding
Results
- The e-Compliance Creation Tool. This is a web-based text editor that uses semantic technology for a more consistent drafting of maritime regulations. For full details, see here.
- Port Community System integration. We discussed possible approaches to sharing data between PCSs in different European countries. In addition, we demonstrated a concrete implementation of such an infrastructure for the ports of Barcelona and Marseille. For more details, see here.
- Electronic Maritime Certificates. e-Compliance has built a fully functional implementation of electronic maritime certificates on mobile devices. For full details, refer to Chapter 4 of this document.
- Port/Ship integration. This approach allows ship agents to define local rules and requirements and send them electronically to an on-board ship system, which in turn assists the crew with mandatory reporting. Refer to Chapter 2 of this document for more details.
- SMS Assistant. This is a fully electronic implementation of an on-board Safety Management System. More details are given in Chapter 3 of this document.