in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
The TALQ Consortium, the standards body behind the Smart City Protocol for outdoor lighting, published Edition 5 of its free TALQ Tender Template on 29 October 2026 from Piscataway, New Jersey, in seven languages and in editable formats, ahead of the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona in November, according to a press release carried by LED professional. The edition summarises technical requirements in five profiles, adds the two DALI D4i TALQ Zhaga profiles that entered the TALQ specification in version 2.7.0 earlier in 2026, and is aimed at cities, municipalities, utilities, operators and project developers that draft tenders for smart street lighting from several vendors.
The document is the successor to the consortium’s Pocket Guide for Smart Outdoor Lighting and has been renamed the TALQ Tender Template, a change that places it as drafting material for procurement teams and not as a general guide.
Five Profiles Define The Technical Requirements
Edition 5 organises its requirements and functional use cases into a Lighting Profile, a Cabinet Control Profile, an Asset Management Profile, a DALI D4i Luminaire TALQ Zhaga Profile and a DALI D4i Sensors TALQ Zhaga Profile, which together cover the control of luminaires, the monitoring of control cabinets, the management of installed assets and the data streams of luminaire-level sensors. The template includes wording examples for tender documents in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Romanian, and an updated Chinese version is scheduled for release at a later date.
The consortium says the template draws on real tendered and implemented lighting projects in major cities, and that it incorporates definitions developed with the DALI Alliance and the Zhaga Consortium to unify data streams in street lighting systems. Manufacturers also benefit, according to the release, because a common structure reduces the effort required to answer tenders in different countries.
What The Underlying Specification Requires Of Vendors
The profiles in the template track the TALQ specification, which the consortium updated to version 2.7.0 on 27 February 2026, as Kurrantly reported at the time. That version introduced two mandatory profiles, one for luminaires and one for sensors, that map DALI D4i data attributes into the TALQ data model, and it requires full implementation of all functions in the new profiles so that partial implementations no longer qualify.
Version 2.7.0 also requires gateways under the Lighting Profile to support both lamp actuator and lamp monitor functions, a requirement that previously applied only to central management software platforms. The interface is built on RESTful APIs defined with the OpenAPI Specification, uses JSON over TCP/IP and HTTPS, and the specification is published free of charge on GitHub.
Certification Gives Buyers A Product Count To Specify Against
A tender template is only as useful as the number of certified products that can meet it, and the consortium’s own counts show the pool growing. As of October 2025, 74 products were certified, made up of 31 central management software platforms and 43 gateways from 47 vendors, and by 3 June 2026 the portfolio had reached 85 products, with 37 platforms and 48 gateways, an increase of 11 products or about 15 percent in roughly eight months.
The 3 June 2026 release announced the first solution certified against the new DALI D4i TALQ Zhaga profiles, a central management software product from Luminext that was recently re-certified. Robert Tissing, chief executive of Luminext, said in the TALQ announcement: “Thanks to the outstanding work of our software team, certification was achieved the very next day.”
An Organisation Of More Than 80 Members
The consortium, founded in 2012, describes itself as having established a globally accepted standard for management software interfaces that control and monitor heterogeneous smart city applications, and it currently has more than 80 member companies. Its February 2026 release put the count at 82.
The release positions the template as support for tenders that prioritise future-proof, interoperable and open solutions from multiple vendors, and it states that investments in public lighting infrastructure are long-term decisions in which replacing or newly designing street lighting equipment together with intelligent control systems is technically complex. For many officials, according to the consortium, composing an outdoor lighting tender may be a once-in-a-career task.
Where Interoperable Tendering Meets Procurement Practice
The template arrives as municipalities sign long-term lighting contracts that bundle luminaires, communications and management software. In Covilhã, Portugal, a 16-year energy-efficiency contract worth about €19 million including VAT covers 19,533 connected LED luminaires with a LoRaWAN layer and the ARQUILED ECCOS City management platform, a structure in which the choice of control interface determines how freely a municipality can add third-party equipment during the contract term.
Interface requirements written into the tender are the point at which that flexibility is secured, because a requirement for TALQ-certified management software and gateways allows a buyer to compare products against a published test regime and not against vendor-specific application programming interfaces. The template supplies the wording for that requirement in seven languages, and the Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Romanian versions cover several of the largest European public lighting markets by language.
