European road operators cooperate under the EasyWay umbrella to develop and deploy a number pan-European core services for road transport. The workhas highlighted the need to improve the understanding of the specific user needs of road freight transport companies. In contrast to general traffic information which addresses the individual driver, including truck drivers, traffic information for road freight transport is also an essential input for the haulers’ fleet management, impacting on the service quality they can offer their customers and in the end, crucial to their business. However, European road operators are lacking a common strategy to handle thedemands for traffic and network information from the road transport sector and the related potential commercial service providers. FREIGHTWISE, an FP6 project, has started to develop standardized messages between the traffic information provider and the transport companies, as a subset of an intermodal system architecture. This paper examines the potential for a combining the approaches of EasyWay and FREIGHTWISE in order to integrate traffic management systems and freight transport management systems.
Abstract