Search

Representatives from the European high energy physics community have played an active part in the definition of FASTBUS, their efforts being coordinated by the ESONE-ASSG. The specification is now in its concluding stages and work on prototyping is increasing. The design of general purpose FASTBUS hardware, interfaces etc, is progressing; the first FASTBUS system at CERN has become operational in an experiment, tenders are in preparation for crates, power supplies and cooling. The specification of a standard FASTBUS coupler or protocol circuit is nearing completion. A number of FASTBUS applications in experiments are under consideration, both at CERN and other European laboratories.

Is the Government privatising efficiently? Is it floating the shares in nationalised industry economically? Will British Telecom be under-priced? Professor Davis and Roger Buckland have studied the privatisation issues of shares over five years and found large but avoidable losses. They argue that the Government's marketing technique could be improved by making less use of the large financial institutions and more use of competitive tenders.

In April of 1981, Gaz Metropolitain Inc. of Montreal retained the consulting firm of Coggan Douserv Associates Limited to design, specify and call tenders on a computerized gas dispatch control system. An integral part of the design mandate was to obtain the maximum possible value in the system which was eventually purchased. Executing a technically accurate design while at the same time seeking maximum value involved the following steps: 1. Matching the owner's needs with the available technology. This involved clearly defining the owner's needs while at the same time confering with various suppliers to determine what represented the best combination of new, yet proven, technology. 2. Designing by modules. This involved defining the system in terms of modules for which the performance could be well described and for which unit prices could be obtained. 3. Fvaluating supplier's proposals. This involved establishing criteria and their order of importance and weight and then comparing supplier's proposals factor by factor to the ideal. This paper describes the details involved in the three steps mentioned above.

The services that a quantity surveyor normally provides on a construction project have been described in some detail in earlier chapters and include the following: (1) preliminary cost advice; (2) cost planning; (3) advice on contract procedures and types of contract; (4) advice on methods of obtaining tenders; (5) advice on procedures for selecting contractors; (6) preparation of tendering documents; (7) adjudication and negotiation of tenders; (8) periodic financial statements; (9) valuation of work in progress for advance payments; (10) preparation and settlement of the final account; and (11) examination and settlement of claims.

Since May 1980, New Brunswick has called separate tenders for the right to explore and develop several potash prospects, as well as areas underlain by Alberta oil shale. These tender calls had in common the provision for a basic ad-valorem royalty, combined with sharing of cash flow after exceeding a 15–20 % discounted cash flow rate-of-return threshold. In the case of potash, the bidding variable was a share of cash flow, but for oil shale it was exploration expenditures committed, with the cash flow sharing to be negotiated at the time of application for a production lease. The Millstream potash occurrence, previously discovered by government drilling, received five bids (21.1 % highest), the Dorchester “grassroots area” with four surmised drill targets apparently received no bids, and in the case of oil shale there were only two bids on the one block previously subjected to the most exploration. It is concluded that New Brunswick will not be successful in awarding the potash or oil shale rights in return for a comparable level of basic royalty and cash flow share as in the case of Millstream, unless it spends money in discovering prospects or sharing the exploration risk with companies. The approach is likely to work for oil shales only if current exploration proves the existence of much high-quality material or a definite trend of real increases in the price of oil is again established. Undoubtedly, it continues to be desirable to assure an on-going stable investment climate through award of potash and oil shale rights under terms which provide for a return that the public and future governments will consider fair. This could mean that some form of risk sharing with companies would be advisable.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses rescue and release during a major disaster. A major disaster or relatively minor accident, occurring anywhere in Great Britain, can be attended in a short space of time by a specially equipped fire service unit and crew. To provide adequate rescue cover, conventional water tenders used for fire-fighting purposes are equipped with a certain amount of equipment to enable them to tackle incidents, such as minor road accidents and persons trapped in machinery or lifts. Back-up is provided, particularly in urban or industrial areas, by specially equipped emergency or rescue tenders, which can cope with the larger scale incidents that can occur. The first step of the officer must be to assess the dimensions of the incident. The equipment utilized by the fire service for rescue purposes varies considerably throughout the country. For complete independence from the mother vehicle, compressed air or hydraulically operated equipment is generally favored. However, the larger emergency tenders are normally fitted with generators to provide power for electrically operated saws or cutting discs, and also oxyacetylene or oxypropane cutting equipment for major cutting work.

In May 1969 the CEGB told the Select Committee that the HTR and SGHWR both ‘showed promise of significant economic advantages on the AGR’.1 The great development potential of the AGR was no longer talked of. The CEGB preferred the HTR; it promised lower costs, greater long-term economies, could be a direct source of high temperature process heat for industry, and, being gas-cooled, would use familiar technologies. They thought the remaining technical problems could be solved quickly, and that it could ‘probably be ordered in the next year or two’.2 In 1970 the CEGB called for tenders to be submitted in April 1970 for an HTR to be built at Oldbury.3

The refusal of the Roosevelt administration in 1933–4 to assume any responsibility for the world’s economic health, combined with its reluctance to cooperate with the British Treasury on silver policy in China, encouraged the British government to adopt a unilateral, forward policy in China, one which increasingly placed it in the role of China’s defender against the Japanese. Norman’s influence ensured that the Foreign Office and the Treasury cooperated with the HSBC. When the London Manager of the HSBC (O. J. Barnes) frankly confessed to being ‘out of his depth’ regarding matters of China loans and currency,1 the Government turned once again to Addis, whose unrivalled expertise and experience with China loans and Chinese railways made him indispensable.

This chapter discusses the selection of the minicomputer system. The selection of a standard computer is expensive in the time of technical and executive staff. The selection of an application area, to which a minicomputer is to be attached, forms a part of the initial definition of objectives. Failure to define the requirements of a potential user can result in disappointment when the system is ultimately acquired and installed. This often entails expensive alterations in the early operational period to ensure that the installation meets all the requirements of the user. In considering a minicomputer system for a small commercial organization for business data processing, the possible alternatives of a VRC, small standard mainframe, computer service bureau and mechanized accounting equipment should also be taken into account. The consideration of the various alternatives to the minicomputer is a part of a feasibility study, which is usually made before a consultant is engaged or detailed specifications are drawn up. The chapter describes the procedure for evaluating the tenders from various minicomputer manufacturers and presents some aspects of the various criteria for selection of a minicomputer.

This chapter is concerned with tendering procedures and contractor selection, the methods of preparing estimates by contractors and the compiling of tenders, the appraisal of tenders by the engineer, the methods used for accepting tenders and notifying the results, and finally the signing of the contract.

The Coast Guard plans to replace its aging fleet of buoy tenders with newly constructed vessels. Many of the vessel designs being considered have never been built, therefore they have no track record. Moreover, the Coast Guard requires a way to compare these vessels against one another for each operating district of consideration in order to choose the best vessel possible. A simulation has been developed which models a single tender working a given field of buoys. The purpose of this model is to evaluate alternative buoy tender designs of differing characteristics in realistic operational environments.

SUMMARY This paper outlines the work in the period 1980 to 1983 and being funded by Directorate General XII (for Research, Science and Development) of the Commission of the European Communities. The work includes a Call for Tenders for passive solar building components, a Performance Monitoring programme of several passive solar dwellings throughout Europe, a coordinated passive solar research programme, the First and Second European Passive Solar Competitions - 1980 and 1982, and an assessment study of the prospects for solar thermal energy in Europe.

At the beginning of 1980, the Commission launched a call for tenders for photovoltaic pilot projects in the 30 to 300 kW range. After a selection procedure 15 projects were started at the beginning of 1981.

ROV’s in past years have been very much a tail-end requirement within offshore Construction Contracts, for jackets/platforms and pipeline installations. Scant regard has been given to their use and specification for application within such Contracts. Their importance to a project has been considered minimal by both the Management Contractor, Detail Design Engineer (who prepares the overall construction Invitation to Tender Scope of Work), and the Client Organisation. This situation is now changing due mainly to the ROV’s increasing offshore experience and developing sophistication. For example the use in 1984 of multiple ROV’s for positioning and installation of the CONOCO Hutton TLP in the North Sea.

We consider solution strategies for stochastic programs whose deterministic equivalent programs take on the form: Find x∈ℝ n , χ∈ℝ m such that x≥0, Ax=b, Tx=χ and z=cx+Ψ(χ) is minimized. We suggest algorithms based upon (i) extensions of the revised simplex method, (ii) inner approximations (generalized programming techniques), (iii) outer approximations (min-max) strategies.

n/a

Many prospective owners of diesel engines are tempted into fixing arbitrary parameters in specifying their requirements, and often these are copied from specifications drawn up at some more or less remote time by consulting engineers. This is not the right thing to do. To fix a limit on brake mean effective pressure, or piston speed, or rotational speed, for example, is to risk barring access to the most efficient region of operation of a modern machine’s available performance. Alternatively, the result may be to exclude, from the allowable tenders, the machinery which would be the best economic proposition either in invested capital or operating cost.

n/a

The present port of Kandla came into existence in 1931. Constructed under the orders of the then Maharao of Kutch, it has a single reinforced concrete jetty with depth of water alongside of 30 feet at low water, a small area of reclaimed land with transit sheds and residential accommodation for the staff. The necessity for an additional major port on the coast of Kathiawar and Kutch was felt even in 1946. Selection of Kandla was made in 1948 and preliminary surveys and works were started in 1949. By the end of 1950, while some of the surveys and investigations were nearing completion, outline plans for the preliminary layout were prepared. Tenders called for on the basis of designs and rates from selected engineering firms evoked keen competition from international firms of considerable repute and experience in harbour engineering works. Received in April 1951, these tenders incorporating designs of various types were carefully scrutinised by a special Committee of engineers and the contract was finalised by March 1953.

Almost all textbooks in economics contain a section on supply curves, but there are very few, if any, examples of such curves which are “real” in the sense that they are based on actual observations. One of the present authors stumbled, as it were, over such an example: the public tenders of treasury bills which have been held in the Netherlands since 1882. These tenders are organized by the Agent of the Ministry of Finance in Amsterdam. He opens the opportunity for those interested in buying treasury bills at prices to be determed by the participants. The reactions of these persons (usually bankers, money brokers and municipalities) can be regarded in terms of a demand schedule for treasury bills, but it is at least as natural to consider them as a supply schedule for short-term money. The latter standpoint will be adopted in this paper.

International audience; Distribution system operators' roles are evolving from a "fit-and-forget" approach towards an active management of their distribution grid. With this approach flexibility management at the local level can defer or avoid costly reinforcements and have a more efficient use of existing assets. Flexibility tenders are emerging as a mechanism that allow DSOs to procure flexibility for the medium to long term. This works proposed a modular framework to analyze the market rules of local flexibility tenders for the participation of distributed energy resources (DER), with a particular focus on demand response and electric vehicles, and applied it to the case study of UKPN's flexibility 2018/2019 tender and Enedis proposal for flexibility procurement. These tenders have been built to allow the participation of DER, but still there are barriers that may hinder their optimal participation, especially regarding connection procedures and baseline definition.

Nearly all regional public bus services in Sweden have been competitively tendered for 30 years. The way to perform tenders has undergone significant changes since the first tenders were carried out in the late 1980s. The most important changes are: 1) pure gross cost contracts have been replaced with contracts that include bonus and malus clauses to safeguard the quality of the service or contracts with passenger incentives; 2) bundling of bus lines into larger networks; 3) requirements on operators to provide buses that use specific types of fuel, for example electricity or gas; and 4) bundling of bus and railway services into one contract. The case in Sweden for using incentives based on the number of passengers is to a high extent motivated by a national goal to double the market for regional public transportation and is partly motivated as a way to solve practical problems encountered by the PTAs. Building on previous research, the goal of this paper is to explore and compare how the contract design in tendered regional bus services in Sweden influences performance in terms of costs, passenger growth, and on the frequency of major conflicts between the contracting parties. The economic performance and other effects of the different contract types are measured using a database on all Sweden's regional bus services, collected by the government agency Transport Analysis, and national data on public bus services published annually by the same agency. The conflict aspects are studied using the annual reports of the PTAs procuring the bus services.

Energy efficiency retrofits are often impeded by high perceived investment risks, long payback periods and a lack of skills. At the municipal level these issues are particularly pronounced as procuring, implementing, and managing retrofits can exceed existing municipal governance capacities. The diffusion of municipal LED street lighting as a replacement for conventional lighting serves as an example. This paper argues that technological (e.g. complexity and maturity), economic (e.g. selling services vs. products and financing costs), institutional (e.g. property situation and contracts) and competency barriers to retrofitting (e.g. lack of measurement capacity and qualified facilitators) translate into transaction costs. We develop a taxonomy of appropriate modes of municipal retrofitting governance based on transaction costs economics. The findings indicate that more market-based solutions, energy performance contracts in particular, can facilitate the procurement of innovative energy efficiency retrofitting solutions and associated investments among municipalities if neutral tenders, open-book accounting, municipal ownership and intermediary organisations allow municipalities to choose appropriate governance structures for particular technologies and retrofits.

This chapter explores three of the challenges that public buyers face when designing public tenders to support smart urban mobility initiatives and when supervising the execution of the relevant contracts. First, the chapter covers emerging issues around access and re-use of transport data that may be hindering ‘outside of the box’ thinking and the deployment of artificial intelligence in this area. Second, it discusses some well-known ‘inside the box’ regulatory issues around the exercise of discretion in the choice of sustainable technological solutions, the constraints surrounding certain types of complex and collaborative procurement, and the difficulties in monitoring contract compliance clauses. Third, the chapter arrives at the realisation that the main challenges in delivering and supporting smart urban mobility through procurement relate to the higher-level or cross-cutting challenges of the professionalisation of the procurement workforce and the need to bridge significant (and growing) knowledge gaps. It thus explores existing policy interventions aimed at the professionalisation and networking of procurement officials. The chapter concludes with some overall reflections, and a call for a more active role to be taken by the new Von der Leyen Commission.

• Australia is largely self-sufficient in its supply of safe, fresh blood products because of the goodwill of non-remunerated, volunteer donors, plus rigorous testing and processing standards. • CSL Limited is the sole provider of plasma fractionation services in Australia, enjoying exclusive rights under the Plasma Fractionation Agreement with the Australian Government. • In the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), Australia agreed to review its current contract with CSL Limited, and to recommend to the states and territories that the process be opened up to overseas tender. • Overseas tenders for off-shore fractionation services are likely to be highly competitive due to their low manufacturing costs and accumulated expertise. • Off-shore fractionation could compromise the safety of Australia's blood supply through delays in processing and transportation, issues related to quality control, and even the siphoning of stock to overseas markets. This could compromise the long-term care of Australian patients and create a serious national security risk in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. • Australia's AUSFTA obligation to recommend changes does not equate to an obligation to actually proceed. The states and territories should carefully consider whether such changes would be in our national interest. • The long-term security of the Australian people in the current security environment is dependent on continuance of an onshore fractionation plant and appropriate back-up facilities.

The International Maritime Satellite Organization (INMARSAT) has come into being as a result of conferences by the Inter-governmental Maritime Consultative Organisation (IMCO). Its administration has been set up in London, and the organization has called for tenders for the satellites and ground stations required, and as an interim measure is arranging to use a share of the facilities of existing satellite systems. Its aim is to improve telecommunications facilities for the world's shipping and thus to reduce risks to life and property at sea, increase the efficiency of ship management, and to provide a satellite service, owned by the participating governments, that has been long in demand.

Wide variations in the description of similar items, the units adopted, methods of measurement and in the provision of basic data between one region and another lead contractors to include costly safeguards in their tenders for public works, argue the authors in this paper presented at a symposium on ‘Standardisation in Construction and Buildings’ held at Roorkee, UP, India last year, sponsored by the Civil Engineering Division of the Institution of Engineers, India, and the Central Building Research Institute, Roorkee. The work of preparing such a standard schedule has now been undertaken by the National Buildings Organisation, and the authors briefly outline the methodology adopted.

In a big organization like the Australian Post Office, where large sums of money are spent to purchase a very large number of items every financial year, the problem is that of allocating the orders of the different items to the competing tenderers at a minimum cost. We have dealt with this in two sections; one is devoted to quantity discounts, the other to order value discounts. We have shown the mathematical formulation using integer and mixed integer linear programming, the mathematical programming systems used, the benefits gained and costs incurred, and the effects of the implementation of minimum cost allocation techniques on the organizational structure of some sections of the A.P.O. We have also shown that these techniques could be used to analyse the relative economic efficiencies of the competing tenderers with the objective of formulating a suitable economic purchasing policy for the organization concerned.

The selection of a computer system to satisfy an end-user requirement can be very difficult. With the advent of cheap microcomputers in the early 1980s, many small- to medium-sized organisations which had never had computer systems of their own started to purchase microcomputer and minicomputer systems. It was, and still is, very easy to purchase a system which, at best, is difficult for non-computer literate staff to use, or at worst, does not satisfy the end-user requirements. This paper describes techniques which can be used to formalise the purchase of small- to medium-sized computer systems.

It is essential that the engineer preparing a specification or assessing competitive tenders for a.c./d.c. thyristor convertors has a background knowledge of the factors which have to be considered by the designer of the equipment. The aim of this article is to outline these factors in a concise form and explain how they can influence the design and protection requirements of the convetor

Many relatively small control systems now involve sophisticated techniques, and digital computers are being used in larger numbers. Satisfaction or disappointment with the system depends to a considerable extent on the effectiveness of the inquiry specification, the assessment and selection of the tenders received and the contractual relationships established

After a description of British Coal's method of organizing purchase contracts and consequent requirements for evaluating tenders, reference is made to the use of linear programming to allocate business. The later part of the paper describes the development and operation of a user-friendly, menu-driven microcomputer decision-support system for tender evaluation called INSECT, which uses a purpose-built, quasi-optimizing routine rather than linear programming.