Ring Buoy (Life Buoy) Request for Tender

Dublin City Council and Water Safety Ireland are seeking innovative solutions to alert Water Safety Officers when ring buoys are tampered with or go missing. Think low cost, scalable Internet of Things”

Is your company up to the challenge?

This is a ‘first of kind’ innovation competition (in Ireland) where you can apply to pilot and validate your solution with €10k upfront in funding. If successful, you may get to sell your solution to a national framework of over 20 local authorities.

If this sounds interesting, keep reading…

Dublin City Council manages approximately 140 ring buoys in Dublin.  These ring buoys are located on the banks of the two canals, the three rivers (Liffey, Tolka and Dodder), in the Docklands area and in the Council beach areas. Unfortunately, approximately 15 of these ring buoys go missing/are stolen every week.  This problem exists across all 31 local authorities’ areas in Ireland, 18 of which manage coastal water safety and all of which manage inland water safety. Across Ireland, hundreds of life buoys go missing every week, putting people’s lives at risk.

Dublin City Council’s Water Safety Officer and Water Safety Ireland are jointly responsible for the monitoring and maintenance of the ring buoys in Dublin City.  Inspectors regularly visit each ring buoy location to check the integrity of each ring buoy. This includes checking the ring buoy itself, its casing and the rope.  All issues are manually recorded on a report sheet. The report sheets are brought back to the office, issues are recorded, reported, and the report sheets are stored.  New parts (ring buoys or rope) are ordered and deployed on the next visit to that location.  This process can delay ring buoy replacement turnaround time.  Each ring buoy costs approximately €40.  The need to replace approximately 600 ring buoys each year costs Dublin City Council in excess of €20,000 and potentially endangers lives.  Due to health and safety issues, ring buoys cannot be re-distributed if they have been tampered with and many end up in landfill sites.

Based on the feedback from a Prior Information Notice (PIN) published in December 2019, Dublin City Council now wishes to establish a Framework Agreement.  It involves a two-phased approach alongside a public procurement of innovation process (see diagram below) to procure low cost, retro-fit end-to-end, IoT solutions to alert, monitor and report on ring buoy theft across multiple sites in the Dublin Region.  For further information please go directly to the tender.