Dangerous goods transport regulations aims to protect everyone either directly involved (consignors or carriers), or who might indirectly become involved (emergency services, public). ADR /RID /ADN regulations assign duties and define rules, for minimising the hazards related to the carriage and the risk of incidents, and guarantee an effective response. Current regulations envisage paper form documents, for the purposes of transport operations, law enforcement and accidents (retrieved by police and emergency services).
Today, the majority of the companies transporting hazardous materials by road and rail have tracking and tracing solutions/services (satellite navigation based), which gather in electronic form most of the information required in the paper transport documents.
Over the last few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the authorities towards the benefits generated by the adoption of these solutions on a large scale, for:
_Enhanced efficiency, safety and security (improved law enforcement and risk assessment, reduced accidents/relevant consequences, environmental damage and emergency response time)
_Introduction of electronic (digitalised) transport documents .
Various initiatives have been developed in Europe to:
_Increase the reliability of the tracking and tracing solutions/services through advanced technologies (e.g. based on the European GNSS and on multi-GNSS capabilities)
_Validate the use of telematics to meet regulations and encourage the adoption of electronic transport documents.
However these initiatives are fragmented, geographically spread, lacking of a common/harmonised approach for a technical/functional architecture and standards, at national and international levels. Moreover, they require information sharing by the involved business actors and stakeholders, without robust incentive models.
In this context, the European CORE project (www.coreproject.eu) develops a best practice based on a flexible architecture and standards, and involving different countries. Its outcomes contribute to the harmonisation of cross-border operations, underlying policies and regulation.