API Design & Implementation Principles

The purpose of this document is to establish guidelines on how APIs should be designed, developed and implemented in the digital container shipping context.

Starting with Q4 2025, DCSA standards are developed and expected to be implemented following the simplified "API Design and Implementation Guidelines", currently version 3.0.

For the principles used by older standards, consult the archive section below.

DCSA supports multiple API definition versions. Older versions can be based on archived versions of the design principles.