Project № 101122498 — 22-EU-TG-RIS COMEX 2

River Information Services Corridor Management Execution 2

 

Total project cost: 36 456 050,00 EUR

Budget of Bulgarian Ports Infrastructure Company: 700 000,00  EUR

Start date: 01.02.2023

End date: 31.03.2028

Project duration: 62 months

Bulgarian Ports Infrastructure Company is a part of an international consortium under the COMEX² project, co-funded by the Connecting Europe Facility, aimed at harmonizing and optimizing river information services in Europe. The COMEX² project is the successor of the successfully completed RIS COMEX (2016-2022).

Under the coordination of the Austrian River Authority Viadonau, the project involves 20 partners from 13 different European countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Hungary, Croatia, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Bulgaria) as well as three cooperation partners from Switzerland, Serbia and Ukraine.

COMEX² builds on the RIS COMEX project, having realized the joint European EuRIS platform which provides fairway-, infrastructure-, traffic- and transport data from 13 European countries as a single point of access for all kinds of inland waterway users. COMEX² shall continue, expand and optimise the provided services and data on functional, technical and geographical scope for the benefit of the stakeholders. Focus is also put on making the organisational, legal and financial framework for sustainable operation of EuRIS more flexible and future fit to enable onboarding of additional partners and to ease administrative aspects.

Next to EuRIS, the common electronic reporting system CEERIS was realized among eight European countries in the former project in order to facilitate the reduction of administrative burden. COMEX² will tackle the optimization of CEERIS and, where applicable, of other electronic reporting systems and applications and put a focus on their interconnection in order to foster the reporting only once principle within European inland waterway transport. This certainly also includes the necessary legal framework for international exchange of related data.

The national action plan foresees the pilot development of the measurement of the actual draught in the area of the ship sites, as well as the acquisition and implementation in the BULRIS network of new generation base stations - AIS VDES. These will allow skippers to access a range of innovative services.

  

The main objectives of COMEX²:

  • Assessment of EuRIS, electronic reporting in Europe and other relevant European initiatives (e.g. DIWA, eFTI) to identify needs and requirements to be considered in COMEX²;
  • Evolution of the EuRIS Platform in terms of functional and technical optimization of services, data and interfaces, geographical extension to more waterways and countries as well as ensuring continuous sustainable operation;
  • Optimization, interconnection and integration of existing reporting systems to reduce the administrative reporting burden within IWT enabling the reporting only once principle in Europe;
  • Investigation and realization of common services (e.g. geographical reference data, mobile app);
  • Specify and implement a Joint Notices-to-Skippers editor among interested partners for the common, harmonized generation and publication of NtS messages;
  • Development of a new reference data management RIS.net;
  • Enhancements of national RIS systems and services to act as sustainable and resilient data source.

 

Project Manager: Dipl. Eng. Boyan Rashkov, PHD; Head of Operation and maintenance of RIS system of River Information Services Authority, Tel: + 359 (0) 82 298 462; email: b.rashkov@bgports.bg