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The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and its subsidiary body, the UN Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) have published a set of aligned standards for the digitalisation of intermodal transport data exchanges to support global supply chain cargo movements.  These standards comprise technical specifications and supporting tools: data subsets of the UN/CEFACT Multimodal Transport Reference Data Model (MMT RDM), XSD schemas, data structures, etc., for key documents accompanying goods transported in movements across one or more of the five key modes of transport.

Data exchange structures for maritime, inland water, air, road and rail cargo movements are included and aligned with each other by each being a subset of the overarching UN/CEFACT Multimodal reference data model (MMT), which itself is a part of the UN/CEFACT global supply chain semantic reference data model (BSP RDM). UNECE has been working on developing these standards, covering key documents accompanying goods (consignment notes, bills of lading, and additional documents supporting transport of goods by rail, road, sea, air, and inland water), and supporting pilot projects since 2020.   

The UN/CEFACT RDMs facilitate the use of international standards by packaging the information by a sector of activity or range of related business processes. They therefore provide the basic semantic library of all information and code lists necessary for data exchange in that particular sector. These new UN/CEFACT deliverables contribute to the next generation of United Nations semantic standards for trade and transport data exchange in the Internet era. The new generation of RDM-based standards are exchange syntax independent and are suitable for implementing using modern and emerging technologies, such as XML, JSON, Restful API and blockchain. 

It is important to note that the UN/CEFACT standards do not substitute existing transport contract international regulatory standards such as the IATA standard for an electronic airwaybill. Instead, they offer a basis for operational interoperability of cargo data across different modes of transport and sectors using a common semantic foundation. The aim is seamless and highly efficient exchange of data, while limiting person-to-person contacts in the supply chain, with the use of UN standards and modern IT tools. One of the first industries to use this approach has been freight forwarding. FIATA and UN/CEFACT experts collaborated in 2021 for the development of an electronic FIATA Multimodal Bill of Lading, aligned with the MMT RDM.  

In several pilot projects, experts analysed the transformative capacity of UN/CEFACT standards and MMT RDM. The European Commission, which is working in the Digital Transport and Logistics Forum (DTLF), of which CLECAT is a member, on the implementation of the Electronic Freight Transport Information (eFTI) Regulation is considering the use of the MMT RDM as the common interface for multimodal data exchange.  

The standards and reports of pilot implementation projects are published on the websites of the project and UN/CEFACT. Stakeholders can now use the newly published standards and contribute to their improvement.

Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)