MITS for Safer Seas

Maritime transport and traffic is following the growing slope of trade exchanges between continents and nations. Maritime risks and economic constraints increase at the same speed, together with international competition. This context may be the best asset to join private interests of companies with general concerns of maritime regions for safer seas. The real challenge is to converge rapidly towards standard packages of e-services playing on their economical added value to induce safer attitudes in maritime transport. The position paper demonstrates that most components of a global e-transport and e-navigation service do exist, or could be developed; more, the costs of these technologies could largely be decreased if open, standard, solutions were used instead of proprietary, disparate, "maritime specific" instrumentation. Maritime ITS (MITS) may be our chance to transform the myth of safer seas in reality if we manage to crystallize, from now, the user demand for universal, low cost, transport and navigation aid services with nations will to decrease maritime risks under all their forms. This goal requires accelerating international cooperation works for avoiding invasion of disparate, proprietary, mono task solutions, on and offshore