Monitoring Amsterdam’s bridges and quay walls – innovation competition

If you know Amsterdam, it will not surprise you to learn that the city has 829 bridges and 205 km of quay walls. That’s a lot of maintenance! At the moment only some 10% is monitored, using traditional methods such as tachometric survey and levelling. The engineering department of the City of Amsterdam is therefore looking for new solutions to monitor this infrastructure, to keep it safe and secure for the future. For this reason, they have launched, together with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, an innovation competition (Small Business Innovation Research or SBIR). The competition closes 22 October 2020; interested parties can join the digital information meeting on 9 September.

The city is looking for new techniques and methods for:

• A (more) efficient way to regularly (annually) survey all infrastructure regularly to detect early warning signals, on the basis of lifecycle costs.
• Increased number of solutions for reliable and frequent observation of objects. Companies should consider how their solution contributes to optimisation of cost, speed and capacity required for collection, processing and distribution of monitoring data. The city of Amsterdam prefers solutions that are scalable to other public authorities also.

The city is looking for solutions that can be developed from feasibility to prototype and demonstration (technology readiness level/TRL 3-7). Ideas or concepts (TRL 1-2) are outside the scope of this competition).

Reasons to take part

This competition aims to boost validation of new solutions to monitor bridges and quay walls. It offers companies the opportunity and budget to develop your solution to a product or service ready for the market. Cities and other authorities will be able to start tender procedures to buy these new products and services.

A committee will evaluate the proposals received and select 8 parties for a phase 1 – feasibility study. Each selected company gets € 12,500 (inclusive of VAT) to carry out the feasibility. From those, four companies will be chosen to test their solution at selected test sites in Amsterdam. The budget for that is € 100,000 (inclusive of VAT). This phase starts June 2021 and ends June 2022.

You can register here for the information meeting on 9 September. Information about the competition is available on TenderNed (all information in Dutch).

About Us

Groundstation.space supports and develops innovation projects in the space domain and can support you in identifying opportunities, searching for partners as well as proposal and project management. Please see this page and contact Linda van Duivenbode for more information.