On 1 September an international Request for Tender will be launched to acquire systems capable of operating fleets of automated minibuses within urban areas. All companies or consortia can apply, with the provision that at least 50% of the R&D needs to take place in the EU or Associated Countries.
Self-driving minibuses have already been tested in various countries, but a proof-of-concept for the management of autonomous fleets as part of the public transportation provision is not yet available. The six partner cities are embracing this challenge by collectively procuring R&D for the prototyping and testing of smart systems that are capable of operating a fleet of self-driving minibuses in urban environments. These solutions are expected to be all-inclusive, encompassing software, hardware, fleet and services.
“It is very exciting to soon open the tender that the FABULOS partners have been working on hard for the past months. We have received a lot of interest from the market and we hope this will be reflected in the number of offers. We intend to start the first Phase with 12 different consortia, so we warmly encourage all interested parties to submit a bid!”, says FABULOS Coordinator Renske Martijnse-Hartikka.
Pre-Commercial Procurement as a method
When the Request for Tenders is closed, the Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) process will be executed in three phases, ending in September 2020. Pre-Commercial Procurement challenges industry to develop innovative solutions for public sector needs and it provides a first customer reference that enables companies to create competitive advantage on the market.
The first phase of Pre-Commercial Procurement process is a feasibility study of the selected technologies and proposals. Then, the most promising concepts will be developed into well-defined prototypes and lab-tested in phase two. The third phase aims to verify and compare the first end products in real-life situations. Finally, selected prototypes will be tested as small fleets of automated buses in Estonia, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal.
Companies can receive up to around 5,500,000 Euros to support their R&D work in developing systems capable of operating fleets of automated minibuses. The maximum budget for individual supplier involved in all three phases is approximately 850,000 Euros.
Join the webinars
In order to support tendering process, the FABULOS consortium will host two 90-minute webinars. First webinar will be held on 11 September and the second on 15 October 2018. During these webinars the Request for Tenders documentation and process will be explained. There will be also plenty of opportunity to ask questions. Save the dates and register for the FABULOS Webinars!
The Request for Tenders will be open until 31 October 2018 (17.00 CET) . The documents will be made available on the FABULOS website together with detailed tendering guidelines on the day of the launch.