RIS are defined and in the Directive 2005/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as following:

River information services (RIS) means the harmonised information services to support traffic and transport management in inland navigation, including, wherever technically feasible, interfaces with other transport modes. RIS do not deal with internal commercial activities between one or more of the involved companies, but are open for interfacing with commercial activities. RIS comprise services such as fairway information, traffic information, traffic management, calamity abatement support, information for transport management, statistics and customs services and waterway charges and port dues.

RIS is implemented or is being implemented in all EU Member States and non-Member States (such as Serbia and Ukraine) that are affected by the above quoted RIS-directive. RIS key technologies – that enable the provision of the services – are defined in the directive and specified in the relevant commission regulations (among other the RIS Guidelines).

The RIS Guidelines define services to support transport management, however, this is not yet exploited in an extent that was expected by the stakeholders. RIS authorities and providers have been focussing on the traffic management services in the past years. Several reports have been elaborated in the past years to evaluate the deployment and operation of RIS, whereas the most recent approach is being made with the lead of TNO in the MOVE/B3/SER/2015-224/SI2.720619 Lot2 – Towards Digital Inland Waterway Area and Digital Multimodal Nodes: waterborne digital services between maritime and inland ports. TNO has defined three main problem fields in inland waterway transportation (IWT):

1. Reduced overall cost-competitiveness due to the lack of waterway maintenance in certain countries and inefficient navigation and traffic management;
2. Limited use of inland waterways – particularly in multimodal chains – as the integration of IWT in logistics processes is currently inefficient;
3. High administrative burden and workload to comply with safety-related legislation.

Source

EU-Wide Strategy for Innovation Uptake in Inland Waterway Transport (IWT) (09/03/2017, EIBIP)