Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2021-06-04
Buyer: Forum Virium Helsinki Ltd
Country: FI
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 73120000
Estimated value: 4666622 EUR
Award criteria: The most economic tender

Technical requirements: AI4Cities is a 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 commonly identified procurement need shared by all procurers in the Buyers Group is for solutions that support Cities transition to carbon neutrality via AI and related enabling digital technologies.
Based on this, two domains linked to the Cities’ strategies and carbon-positive goals have been identified, which are mobility and energy. They form the two lots of the Pre-Commercial Procurement action, referred to as Lots: Lot 1 – Smart Mobility and Lot 2 – Smart Energy.
Performance of the R&D in Europe. Testing of the prototypes developed will be tested in Helsinki, Tallinn, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Ile-de-France (Paris region and Stavanger.
The Europe-wide challenge-based pre-commercial procurement (PCP) focuses on radical innovation and is meant for services, tools or products that are not yet on or close to the market that support the Buyers Group transition to carbon neutrality via AI and related enabling digital technologies. Two key domains linked to the Cities’ strategies and emission goals have been selected to be sub-challenges of the PCP actions, which are Lot 1: Mobility and Lot 2: Energy with sub-challenges. The lots are executed parallel and identically.
The Request for Tenders (RfT) was open from 1 December 2020 to 28 February 2921. Each selected supplier is awarded a framework agreement that covers three R&D phases. A total procurement budget of EUR 4 666 622 is allocated to this PCP to be distributed among the 3 phases.
1) Phase 1 (solution design) 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. There will also be a description of the results of their feasibility studies and their conclusions to the continuation of the development activities in Phase 2.
2) Phase 2 (prototyping) consists of a first prototype development and will last 4 months. It will focus on a strong collaboration between the Buyers Group and the Suppliers. Phase 2 foresees the awarding of 10 contracts per lot.
3) In Phase 3 (piloting) a limited number of suppliers 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 for the Suppliers to their prototype’s continuous development. Phase 3 foresees the awarding of 3 contracts per lot. The piloting phase has a duration of 6 months and the solutions will be tested at least in two of the Buyers Group cities.
The number of suppliers reduces with each phase and the same time funding per supplier will increase within each phase.
Lot 1: Smart Mobility includes three sub-challenges (plus a wild card) that the suppliers can try to solve with their solution.
Within these sub-challenges, Cities describe and give examples of their cities’ current needs. It is not expected that a solution would cover every issue mentioned under a sub-challenge. However, if a solution solves only one of the issues listed, it may not be enough for the solution to advance to the later phases of the PCP.
Thus, it is encouraged that a Tenderer tries to address several problem areas mentioned under one or multiple sub-challenges. If the solution can be used to solve problems in both challenges (Mobility and Energy) it can also be considered as an advantage. However, a solution/Tender can only apply to one lot, i.e. the Tender must clearly identify for which lot it is applying, and that solution cannot be included in another parallel Tender submitted to the remainder Lot.
One Tenderer can submit multiple Tenders, as long as the solutions are different, but can be selected only once. A company can be a partner in several consortiums, if the other consortiums accept it too. A company can apply only once as a Lead Tenderer only.
Sub-challenges are presented in details in https://ai4cities.eu/challenges/mobility and the Tender Document 1 (https://ai4cities.eu)


Winner: Forum Virium Helsinki
Award value: 4666622
Number of bids: 97