2009-02: Validation of the Freightwise Framework (D17.2) - a report on progress by Yannis Tyrinopolous

The first phase of the Freightwise Framework (FWF) validation was devoted to the assessment of the usefulness, acceptance and technical completeness of the FWF by selected stakeholders-members of the Freightwise business cases. These stakeholders expressed their satisfaction and acceptance of the Framework; they made however, useful and concrete comments that will facilitate its completion. Two of the most important aspects examined across all four elements of the FWF are: a) the level of coverage and b) the simplicity of all four FWF elements. The most important finding is the effective coverage of stakeholders’ types, transport and business processes, information flows and messages used in the current intermodal freight transport by the corresponding FWF elements.  This mainly applies to the Information Packages due to the satisfactory level of coverage of the fields and attributes of the messages currently interchanged between the various parties in the transport chain by the FWF.

Enabling simplicity is a major goal of Freightwise. Therefore, this aspect of the FWF was thoroughly examined. The major outcome was that more effort must be placed in the Information Packages. The interviewees expressed a great need for simplifying the business and transport transactions and procedures, and the analysis demonstrated the major difficulty in developing messages that will significantly reduce the existing complexity.

The validation report also draws some recommendations, based on the FWF validation results, for the next version of the FWF. The efforts should be placed in the following aspects:

• Sufficiency of the standardized format of messages
• Simplicity of messages and interfaces
• Harmonization of messages serving co-modality
• Facilitation of communication between stakeholders