Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2020-02-20
Buyer: Forum Virium Helsinki Ltd
Country: FI
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 73120000
Estimated value: 4666630 EUR

Technical requirements: This pre-commercial procurement is carried out by Forum Virium Helsinki who was appointed as lead procurer in the name and on behalf the group listed in I.1). The applicable national law is Finnish.
Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP) to Buy R&D Services to Support Cities' Transition to Carbon Neutrality, by Applying the Use of AI and Related Technologies to Reduce the Cities GHG Emissions
The purpose of this pre-commercial procurement (PCP) is to support cities’ transition to carbon neutrality, by applying the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and related enabling digital technologies to tackle the challenge of reducing the cities’ GHG emissions.
AI4Cities challenges will be built on highly innovate and not market-ready technologies, to be applied in difficult contexts in 2 sub-challenges, Energy (Lot 1) and Mobility (Lot 2). Sub-challenges will revised during the open market consultation phase.
Performance of the R&D mainly in Europe. Testing of prototypes developed will be tested in Helsinki, Tallinn, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris Region and Stavanger.
Pre-commercial procurement (PCP) focuses on radical innovation and is meant for services, tools or products that are not yet on or close to market. With the support and participation of like-minded cities, a Europe-wide PCP challenge-based competition will be launched.
The PCP focused on procurering R&D development of solutions that support cities transition to carbon neutrality via AI and related enabling digital technologies. Based on this, 2 key domains linked to the cities’ strategies and carbon-positive goals have been pre-selected and will most likely form the 2 sub-challenges of the PCP action, hereon referred to as lots, which are Lot 1: Mobility and Lot 2: Energy.
This PCP is done by buyers group, with Forum Virium Helsinki as its lead procurer. Additional buyers group members are: City of Amsterdam, Cap Digital (Paris Region), City of Copenhagen, City of Tallinn and City of Stavanger.
The PCP process will start with an Open Market Consult (OMC), which is the subject of this announcement. During the OMC a large scale co-creation process will take place based on the underlying premise of applying AI towards solving Cities GHG emissions. Innovative solutions must produce an impact in helping Cities reduce their GHG emissions.
After the OMC period and based on its results, a request for tenders (RfT) will be launch December 2020/January 2021. Each selected supplier will be awarded a framework agreement that covers three R&D phases. Number of suppliers reduces with each phase and a same time funding per supplier will increase within each phase.
1) Phase 1 (concept phase) will focus on the feasibility of the proposed solutions. It aims to verify their conceptual, technological, organisational, regulatory, safety and budgetary feasibility. The expected output from participating companies is a report and presentation. It will also a description of the results of their feasibility studies and their conclusions for the continuation of the development activities in phase 2.
2) during Phase 2, consists of a first prototype development. The prototype development phase will have an expected duration of 4 months. It will focus on a strong collaboration between buyer group and suppliers. Therefore it maximises dialogue and collaboration between the city actors and the teams. Phase 2 foresees the awarding of 10 contracts per lot;
3) in Phase 3 a limited number of consortia from Phase 2 will be selected for the testing of prototypes in real-life pilots. It is intended to verify and compare the full feature set and performance of each solution, in operational conditions and provide meaningful feedback to the suppliers for their prototype’s continuous development. The piloting phase has an estimated duration of 6 months and it is expected that the piloted solutions to be tested in 2 of the buyers group cities.
A total procurement budget of 4 666 630 EUR is allocated to this PCP to be distributed among the 3 phases of the PCP.
All OMC activities, including an Q&A section, key dates, venues and registration will be published on the project website http://www.ai4cities.eu, prior to the OMC start, no later than 1.4.2020.


Award value: 4666630