Purchase of sensor box systems

Item Description:

The European Commission is an institution of the European Union, responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the EU treaties and managing the day-to-day business of the EU.

The European Commission, Joint Research Centre (referred to below as the contracting authority) is planning to award the contract(s) resulting from the above procurement procedure. The procurement documents consist of the contract notice, the invitation letter, the draft contract(s) and tender specifications with their respective annexes. All documents are available in the enclosed ZIP File.

This invitation to tender is in no way binding on the contracting authority. The contracting authority’s contractual obligation commences only when the contract with the successful tenderer is signed by both parties.

Up to the signature of the contract the contracting authority may cancel the procurement procedure without tenderers being entitled to claim any compensation. Any such decision must be substantiated and tenderers notified.

The validity period of the tender, during which tenderers may not modify the terms of their tenders in any respect, is indicated under Heading IV.2.6 of the contract notice.

Submission of a tender implies acceptance of all the terms and conditions set out in the procurement documents and, where appropriate, waiver of the tenderer’s own general or specific terms and conditions. The submitted tender is binding on the tenderer to whom the contract is awarded for the duration of the contract.

Objective of this tender

The Joint Research Centre, Air and Climate Unit, is exploring the possibility to use sensor systems to monitor air quality with appropriate data quality. Compared to the European reference methods of air pollution monitoring that are expensive and require skilled operators, the use of sensors would allow increasing of the spatial resolution of sampling points in those areas where fixed air quality stations are not present. Moreover, sensors would allow reducing cost without the need for skilled operators. However, sensors are known to deliver air pollution measurements of questionable accuracy. The objective of the project AQSens is to improve the data quality and confidence in sensor measurements by developing accurate and transparent sensor calibration procedures that can be beneficial to the whole market of sensors. Additionally, the AQSens project plans to demonstrate the validity of sensor systems by performing deployments of sensor networks in 3 European cities.

With the objective of developing calibration procedures for sensors, the main requirement for selecting sensor systems is the availability of raw sensor measurement data and the transparency of all data treatments that are applied to sensor data. A thorough market analysis of all the commercially available and prototype sensor systems have been carried out (JRC116534). More than 1250 records were systematically gathered from peer-reviewed studies of sensor box systems for air quality and air pollution reported in the Scopus database, the World Wide Web, the AirMontech web database (http://db-airmontech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/search.aspx), ResearchGate and Google search. Overall, about a number of 61 independent studies were found from different sources reports, peer-review papers and sensors manufacturers. The analysis was focused on sensors systems for Particulate Matter, Ozone, Nitric Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide and Nitrogen Monoxide. The analysis covered the period between 2010 and 2018. In conclusion to the market analysis, the only sensor system satisfying the requirements of multipollutant, availability of raw data – transparency of data treatment allowing improvement of sensor data quality through the development of calibration procedure, availability of evaluation of the performance of sensor system in literature with high coefficient of determination (R² higher than 0.85) and under 2000 euro has been found to be the AirSensEUR sensor system. The AirSensEUR open source sensor platform was developed by the Joint Research Centre and it is equipped with different sensors to measure air pollutants. The AirSensEUR is an open source system both for the assembling of the hardware and for the data treatment of sensor data.

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