According to EU directive 2002/59/EC, there is a reporting requirement for all institutions dealing with the transport of dangerous goods at sea. This is to be done, as much as possible, in electronic form. For this purpose, the ZMGS provides interfaces for the following facilities.
Reporting services.
Shipping companies and cargo brokers forward their data on the transport of dangerous goods to reporting services which have already been supplying this service to port organisations for a number of years. These reports are used in particular in container traffic, where they are shared with a third party mainly in the Protect format – an EDIFACT derivative.
ZMGS supports this format as well as the XML format developed in cooperation with BAW, the German Waterways Engineering and Research Institute. This is used especially for reporting services that are newly integrated into the system.
Traffic centres.
Every ship is required to contact the responsible agencies via VHF at internationally determined reporting points in order to forward relevant information on ship and cargo. This information is entered into the IT systems of the corresponding traffic centres and forwarded to the ZMGS as a so-called MRS report.
Automatic Identification System.
EU directive 2002/59/EC recommends the use of the Automatic Identification System. It can be used to continuously update the current ship positioning data with the dangerous goods information. This data is forwarded as a so-called AIS report to the ZMGS.
Support for Automatic Identification System AIS.
The IMO promotes the standardisation of ship transponders. Since 2002, it has been planned to make transponders mandatory for all ships in maritime commerce starting from a size of 300 tons gross. Besides information on the position of the ship, transponders provide a variety of information of interest to an observer of shipping traffic.
For any further questions please don't hesitate to contact Thomas Mühlhausen
Thomas Mühlhausen