NoorderSoft puts its own detailed data of the inland waterways network to use by the production and sales of inland waterways VOYAGE PLANNERS and CHART VIEWERS. These software programs - PC-Navigo is the best known - establish the navigability of rivers and canals for specified vessels, and they calculate the itinerary, the duration and all possible delays and obstructions underway.

A series of international projects about RIS (INDRIS, COMPRIS) have made clear how the voyage planner results can be combined with other relevant information sources for inland navigation: position data (GPS, AIS), VTM data, Notices to Skippers (fairway related data, waterlevel data and ice condition data), dynamic progress data, data on lock delays and lock planning, and so on. NoorderSoft is currently implementing most of these combined data in the existing software.

The simplest, but possibly most important achievement of these projects is the Standardised Voyage Plan, a defined format in which a voyage plan can be exchanged with other applications. The NoorderSoft Voyage Planners are able to pass the detailed data of a planned voyage in a range of standard formats (a.o. XML) to other computers and servers.

The Voyage Plan can be considered as "the future part of Tracking & Tracing". While position information of vessels is available through the use of GPS and AIS, FUTURE position information is available through the Voyage Plans of that same vessel. Expressing these data in the same standardised format ensures an easy exchange of these data.

Voyage Plans contain data of the vessel (a.o. dimensions, i.d. and category) and the predicted date and time on which the vessel will pass all points of a planned journey. The date and time of passage can be graphically presented on a computer screen, but also listed in a Voyage Plan table.

The points along the voyage can be expressed as geographical positions, but also as encoded ID's (either the - private - NoorderSoft RIS-Index or the - public - standardised ISRS Index).

How practical the exchange of Voyage Plans is, is shown by DEDICATED NOTICES TO SKIPPERS: a service currently offered by Rijkswaterstaat, in which a Voyage Plan is used to SELECT applicable notices. Only those notices that are important on the planned journey are presented.