Driver assistance functions for safety inland vessel navigation

Inland shipping is an important pillar of the European transport system, however due to dense traffic, reduced visibility and increasing ship dimensions it is very challenging. About 20 to 30 collisions per year, mainly caused by carelessness, lead to damages on waterway infrastructures like bridges, damages on the vessel or even injured people. This fact demonstrates the necessity of driving assistance functions for inland vessels. This contribution will give an overview about the concluded project LAESSI which includes the require-ments for accuracy, integrity and time to alert for the different assistance functions as well as the de-scription of the complete overall system setup like shore-based and board equipment. A main topic in this project was the first realization of the new communication concept based on VHF Data Exchange System (VDES) the next generation of the AIS communication which will also present here. A challenge in this communication concept was the limited data capacity for transmitting all necessary phase and code corrections for every observation in every epoch.