ISO/DIS 26166

Ships and marine technology — ICT reference architecture for digital ship-port interfaces

Scope

The objective of this document is to provide high-level guidance regarding the description of parties, processes and digital interfaces used in communication between shipping and port businesses in conjunction with a ship's call in the port. It is based on the Port Call Optimization Guide from IAPH and IHMA with technical additions from other sources as referenced in the text.
This document will not prescribe any specific process, communication system, interface or protocol specification. It will describe high-level interoperability requirements that are necessary or desirable for building future physical architectures that allow ships in international trade to rely on a more standardized way of exchanging information between ship and shore, related to port calls. This in turn enables the development of off-the-shelf and standardized software systems for ports, terminals and ships, which can support more automated process on shore and on the ship for handling and optimizing port calls.
Thus, this document is intended as a common starting point for the description, development and establishment of future harmonized and international standards for ship-port digital interfaces. At time of writing, there are several different proposals for what can be used as a common standard. Informative Annex provides an overview of some of the organizations and standards. This document is intended as a common basis for discussion and prioritization between these and possibly other specifications.
This document addresses only the ship-port interactions and does not cover internal operations in the port or terminals, or the connection to hinterland or transit transport. This document will only briefly describe nautical functions related, e.g. to coordination and communication between the ship, VTS, pilots and other nautical service providers. This document will mainly consider administrative and operational data exchanges related to port call optimization. Thus, this document does not cover other parts of a complete MIRA, such as communication between ship and ship operator related to voyage orders and noon reports, handling of ship or crew certificates etc. The scope is further detailed in clause 5 of this document.
This document is ship-centric, i.e. it will emphasize vocabulary, object and relationship descriptions as seen from the ship. However, it is also written so that objects should be clearly identifiable also for port parties, although relationships between them may be different as seen from the port. The reason why a ship-centric view has been selected, is that standardization of digital interfaces is most acutely needed for the ships. Ships travel between several thousand ports in most of the world’s countries, and it will not be possible to develop automated and digital information exchanges between ships and ports unless international standards are defined. defines parties and roles related to ship operations, where the roles are intended to be independent of how the ship is operated, e.g. under different contracts or in different trades.