RFP: Improving Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus

In my second engineering design course (Praxis 2), our first major assignment was to prepare a Request for Proposal (RFP) just as a professional engineer would (the Assignment sheet has been attached below). 2 important factors that had to be considered in the making of the RFP were:
             1. The solution must improve the quality of life of the city of Toronto
             2. The problem had to be within the technical capabilities of a 1st year university student
 

Since the proposed problem had to be carefully chosen, our group devoted a significant amount time to look around for possible problems. We set up meetings with different professionals such as firefighters to discuss whether they had any problems in their working environment. Eventually, we were able to come up with a problem that had the appropriate solution space; this was improving the self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) of city of Toronto firefighters. Essentially, the currently used SCBAs posed a major catching hazard to the firefighters while working and our RFP required a solution for this problem. After performing additional research, we documented a list of stakeholders of the project, objectives, constraints, and criteria. We intentionally chose our requirements such that there was a divergent solution space for the problem while keeping the problem statement within the desired frame.