Integrated Command & Control
Solicitation Number: BAA-10-01-RIKA
Agency: Department of the Air Force
Office: Air Force Materiel Command
Location: AFRL/RIK - Rome
Office: Air Force Materiel Command
Location: AFRL/RIK - Rome
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BAA-10-01-RIKA
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Presolicitation
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Added: Mar 08, 2010 10:18 am
NAICS CODE: 541712 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Integrated Command & Control ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 10-01-RIKA CFDA Number: 12.800 I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: Meeting the demands of assigned missions requires unprecedented amount of coordination and synchronization of military resources across all organizations and all echelons of command in all levels of war. It is command and control (C2) that provides the means by which a commander synchronizes and/or integrates force activities in order to achieve the commonly recognized objectives in one unity of effort. These activities require key decisions within the strategy, planning, scheduling and assessment phases of the command and control process. These decisions are made by humans and are supported by computer technology so it is in these areas that information technology contributes the most to ameliorating human capabilities and transforming how the Air Force commands and controls. The goal of the Integrated C2 program is to lead the discovery, development and integration of revolutionary warfighting information technologies that enable continuous and distributed, planning, execution, and assessment of resources across the cyber, air and space domains to achieve commander's intent. Air Force Research Laboratory is seeking innovative white papers to address the following thrusts: • Strategy Development. The functional translation of a commander's conceptual vision and guidance into potential solutions via an adaptive planning capability that supports the generation of a plan of action and seeks to answer the questions of what is to be done and how. By monitoring the plan and operating environment, adapt to evolving situations and represent the necessary actions which incorporate all means available across each of the warfighting domains of the Air Force (air, space and cyber). A key challenge is to understand the complex relationships and dependencies that exist across these domains. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: machine reasoning with uncertain, erroneous, and incomplete information; dynamic causal modeling and multi-criteria analysis summarization; computational efficient mixed initiative planning that balances cognitive and machine load; incorporation of analogical/experiential reasoning (fusion of distributed experiences, capturing knowledge & experience of the past, determining relevancy of past situations); and asynchronous planning on plan fragments versus synchronous "lock and work" planning over multiple iterations. • Synchronized/Integrated Planning. Produce a logistically feasible plan of action to solve the problem, fully integrating subordinate action plans with a description of the role of the other elements of national power in conjunction with military activities. Synchronized/integrated planning includes requests for actions and describes the role of military activities in achieving the desired effects. The integrated "battle" plan enables warfighters to coordinate and synchronize all available forces, kinetic and non-kinetic, to achieve the desired outcomes and exploit opportunities as they present themselves. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: a living plan with "on the fly" action plan/course of action adaptation/mutation that addresses changing conditions of the operational environment; identification, correlation, and advisement on mitigation of external events affecting the processes and mission; continuous adaptive planning; and comprehensive mission-driven situation awareness sharing. • Continuous Assessment. Full spectrum analysis of the attainment of mission objectives at all levels of the campaign (tactical to strategic). At the plan's inception, conduct rigorous examinations of the alternatives and the desired and undesired consequences of each action leading to valuable insight into the actions, causal mechanisms, and effects that support the accomplishment of the objective. Leading indicators or clues can be explicitly identified with their timing which then can be used as a measure of progress towards accomplishing the desired objectives providing the means by which each player understands what is necessary to achieve the overall objectives and the ramifications of their individual actions. Such insights serve to highlight key challenges in sustaining a campaign's progress and are important for synchronizing the force. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: non-deterministic, non-linear causal analysis with reasoning through uncertainty and ambiguity; projective/forward looking analysis through modeling and simulation; use of belief networks within a decision-making environment and how beliefs influence a decision/assessment; dynamic assessment of a-priori and a-posteriori achievement of commander's intent; deliberate causal analysis that identifies key missing data that can be used as information requests; and optimized presentation of complex heterogeneous data. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $43.2M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 11 - $3.7M; FY 12 - $7.6M; FY 13 - $12.1M; FY 14 - $11.4M; and FY15 - $8.4M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 18 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $100K to $1.0M per year. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants or cooperative agreements depending upon the nature of the work proposed. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All potential applicants are eligible. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors are advised that their participation is subject to foreign disclosure review procedures. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors should immediately contact the contracting office focal point, Lynn G. White, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-4996 or e-mail Lynn.White@rl.af.mil for information if they contemplate responding. The e-mail must reference the title and BAA 10-01-RIKA. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal, see Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL/Rome Research Sites "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): A Guide for Industry," April 2007, may be accessed at: http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/Reference%2DNumber%2DBAAGUIDE/listing.html 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit 3 copies of a 3 to 5 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone, fax and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count); Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and reference BAA 10-01-RIKA with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph six of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 11 should be submitted by 1 Oct 2010; FY 12 by 3 Oct 2011; FY 13 by 1 Oct 2012; FY 14 by 1 Oct 2013 and; FY 15 by 1 Oct 2014. White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 30 Sep 2015, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY, are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: https://www.dss.mil/portal/ShowBinary/BEA%20Repository/new_dss_internet//isp/fac_clear/download_nispom.html. 6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Mr. Joseph Antonik, AFRL/RISC, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505 Electronic submission to joseph.antonik@afrl.af.mil will also be accepted. V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: The following criteria, which are listed descending order of importance, will be used to determine whether white papers and proposals submitted are consistent with the intent of this BAA and of interest to the Government: 1) The extent to which the offeror's approach demonstrates an understanding of the problem, an innovative and unique approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology, its application and appropriate levels of readiness at yearly levels. 2) Related Experience - The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge. 3) Openness/Maturity of Solution - The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology in terms of reliability and robustness. 4) Reasonableness and Realism of Proposed Costs - The overall estimated costs should be clearly justified and appropriate for the technical complexity of the effort. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will evaluate the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, and comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a Top Secret facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to Top Secret information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA. Data subject to export control constraints may be involved and only firms holding certification under the US/Canada Joint Certification Program (JCP) (www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp) are allowed access to such data. 3. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offerors will be required to submit their reporting requirement through one of our web-based, reporting systems known as JIFFY or TFIMS. Prior to award, the offeror will be notified which reporting system they are to use, and will be given complete instructions regarding its use. VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC Name: Mr. Joseph Antonik Telephone: (315) 330-1441 Email: joseph.antonik@afrl.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below: Lynn White Telephone (315) 330-4996 Email: Lynn.White@rl.af.mil The email must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition. In accordance with AFFARS 5301.91, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (Aug 2005) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Susan Hunter Building 15, Room 225 1864 Fourth Street Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937) 225-5036; Comm: (937) 255-7754 All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.
Added: May 25, 2010 11:12 am
The purpose of this modification is to: (1) Add "Specific Focus Areas for 2011":Specific Focus Areas for 2011 Effects Assessment Methodology: Investigate quantitative analysis techniques that aid operational assessors' ability to link actions to effects to desired objectives. The specific goals of this effort are to 1) Explore and assess the mathematical techniques that can be applied to improve the performance of the weighted-additive model under conditions of missing data. Within the additive model the scores produced are directly influenced by the data consumed. Missing data will produce erroneous scores and provide misleading analyses and 2) Investigate techniques that demonstrate invariance under conditions of missing data and identify their utility in operational effects assessment. There may be instances where the derivation or estimation of missing data may not be feasible or appropriate. In addition, weighted-additive models have no ability to detect conditions where the data is erroneous. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 Jun 2010. Awards will not exceed 36 months with dollar amounts ranging from $350,000-$400,000. N-Dimensional Effects-Based Assessment Tools: The objective is to provide operational-level assessors the capability to rapidly develop indicators that assess the Measures of Performance (MoPs) and Measures of Effectiveness (MoEs) of a given plan. The indicators must span the spectrum from strategy-to-task planning, the warfighting domains (air, cyber, and space), and support the near-continuous assessment of effects. Specific goals include: (1) The use of case based reasoning with search algorithms and guidance templates to provide an automated means to assist warfighters in selecting suitable indicators, and (2) The use directed graphs to represent the alignment of operational objectives and effects to assess the achievement of the end-states to provide an intuitive user interface for indicator selection/management and visualizing the assessment. The metrics for this program will include the accuracy and completeness of the set of indicators recommended, improvement in the speed of the process (Δt), and overall quality of the resulting operational assessment. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 June 2010. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $500,000 - $1,000,000. COA Analysis Simulation (CASIM): The objective is to provide the ability to quickly develop simulations to analyze COAs and evaluate capabilities across multiple domains. The goals within this effort are to 1) Integrate disparate models and analysis tools within a federation and 2) Advance and employ an integrated composable modeling and simulation capability to create realistic cyber warfare operational scenarios for course of action (COA) exploration. These goals are to be accomplished while taking into consideration the number of COAs analyzed/day, the breadth of effects considered, model integration and setup time, number of models integrated and entities run. The models and simulations are to be focused on Cyber COA development and decision support tools. White papers for this topic will be due by: 21 Jun 10. Awards will range 12-24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $100,000 - $865,000. All other information remains the same.
Added: Jul 26, 2010 7:38 am
The purpose of this modification is to change the technical point of contact. Paragraphs IV.6 and VII are changed as follows:IV.6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Mr. Jerry Dussault, AFRL/RISC, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505 Electronic submission to Jerry.Dussault@rl.af.mil will also be accepted. VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC Name: Mr. Jerry Dussault Telephone: (315) 330-2067 Email: Jerry.Dussault@rl.af.mil No other changes have been made.
Added: May 06, 2011 7:16 am
The purpose of this modification is to republish the original
announcement, incorporating all previous modifications, pursuant to FAR
35.016(c). This republishing also includes the following changes: (a)
Section III.3 and III.4, Eligibility Information: Added information
concerning CCR and Executive Compensation and First-Tier
Sub-contract/Sub-recipient Awards; (b) Section IV.3, Submission Dates
and Times: Added sentence to indicate the closing date of the BAA; (c)
Section VI.3, Award Administration Information : Added more detailed
reporting instructions; and (d) Section VII, Agency Contacts: Updated
clause date and telephone number of the AFRL Ombudsman. No other changes
have been made.NAICS CODE: 541712 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Integrated Command & Control ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 10-01-RIKA CFDA Number: 12.800 I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: Meeting the demands of assigned missions requires unprecedented amount of coordination and synchronization of military resources across all organizations and all echelons of command in all levels of war. It is command and control (C2) that provides the means by which a commander synchronizes and/or integrates force activities in order to achieve the commonly recognized objectives in one unity of effort. These activities require key decisions within the strategy, planning, scheduling and assessment phases of the command and control process. These decisions are made by humans and are supported by computer technology so it is in these areas that information technology contributes the most to ameliorating human capabilities and transforming how the Air Force commands and controls. The goal of the Integrated C2 program is to lead the discovery, development and integration of revolutionary warfighting information technologies that enable continuous and distributed, planning, execution, and assessment of resources across the cyber, air and space domains to achieve commander's intent. Air Force Research Laboratory is seeking innovative white papers to address the following thrusts: • Strategy Development. The functional translation of a commander's conceptual vision and guidance into potential solutions via an adaptive planning capability that supports the generation of a plan of action and seeks to answer the questions of what is to be done and how. By monitoring the plan and operating environment, adapt to evolving situations and represent the necessary actions which incorporate all means available across each of the warfighting domains of the Air Force (air, space and cyber). A key challenge is to understand the complex relationships and dependencies that exist across these domains. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: machine reasoning with uncertain, erroneous, and incomplete information; dynamic causal modeling and multi-criteria analysis summarization; computational efficient mixed initiative planning that balances cognitive and machine load; incorporation of analogical/experiential reasoning (fusion of distributed experiences, capturing knowledge & experience of the past, determining relevancy of past situations); and asynchronous planning on plan fragments versus synchronous "lock and work" planning over multiple iterations. • Synchronized/Integrated Planning. Produce a logistically feasible plan of action to solve the problem, fully integrating subordinate action plans with a description of the role of the other elements of national power in conjunction with military activities. Synchronized/integrated planning includes requests for actions and describes the role of military activities in achieving the desired effects. The integrated "battle" plan enables warfighters to coordinate and synchronize all available forces, kinetic and non-kinetic, to achieve the desired outcomes and exploit opportunities as they present themselves. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: a living plan with "on the fly" action plan/course of action adaptation/mutation that addresses changing conditions of the operational environment; identification, correlation, and advisement on mitigation of external events affecting the processes and mission; continuous adaptive planning; and comprehensive mission-driven situation awareness sharing. • Continuous Assessment. Full spectrum analysis of the attainment of mission objectives at all levels of the campaign (tactical to strategic). At the plan's inception, conduct rigorous examinations of the alternatives and the desired and undesired consequences of each action leading to valuable insight into the actions, causal mechanisms, and effects that support the accomplishment of the objective. Leading indicators or clues can be explicitly identified with their timing which then can be used as a measure of progress towards accomplishing the desired objectives providing the means by which each player understands what is necessary to achieve the overall objectives and the ramifications of their individual actions. Such insights serve to highlight key challenges in sustaining a campaign's progress and are important for synchronizing the force. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: non-deterministic, non-linear causal analysis with reasoning through uncertainty and ambiguity; projective/forward looking analysis through modeling and simulation; use of belief networks within a decision-making environment and how beliefs influence a decision/assessment; dynamic assessment of a-priori and a-posteriori achievement of commander's intent; deliberate causal analysis that identifies key missing data that can be used as information requests; and optimized presentation of complex heterogeneous data. Specific Focus Areas for 2011 Effects Assessment Methodology: Investigate quantitative analysis techniques that aid operational assessors' ability to link actions to effects to desired objectives. The specific goals of this effort are to 1) Explore and assess the mathematical techniques that can be applied to improve the performance of the weighted-additive model under conditions of missing data. Within the additive model the scores produced are directly influenced by the data consumed. Missing data will produce erroneous scores and provide misleading analyses and 2) Investigate techniques that demonstrate invariance under conditions of missing data and identify their utility in operational effects assessment. There may be instances where the derivation or estimation of missing data may not be feasible or appropriate. In addition, weighted-additive models have no ability to detect conditions where the data is erroneous. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 Jun 2010. Awards will not exceed 36 months with dollar amounts ranging from $350,000-$400,000. N-Dimensional Effects-Based Assessment Tools: The objective is to provide operational-level assessors the capability to rapidly develop indicators that assess the Measures of Performance (MoPs) and Measures of Effectiveness (MoEs) of a given plan. The indicators must span the spectrum from strategy-to-task planning, the warfighting domains (air, cyber, and space), and support the near-continuous assessment of effects. Specific goals include: (1) The use of case based reasoning with search algorithms and guidance templates to provide an automated means to assist warfighters in selecting suitable indicators, and (2) The use directed graphs to represent the alignment of operational objectives and effects to assess the achievement of the end-states to provide an intuitive user interface for indicator selection/management and visualizing the assessment. The metrics for this program will include the accuracy and completeness of the set of indicators recommended, improvement in the speed of the process (Δt), and overall quality of the resulting operational assessment. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 June 2010. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $500,000 - $1,000,000. COA Analysis Simulation (CASIM): The objective is to provide the ability to quickly develop simulations to analyze COAs and evaluate capabilities across multiple domains. The goals within this effort are to 1) Integrate disparate models and analysis tools within a federation and 2) Advance and employ an integrated composable modeling and simulation capability to create realistic cyber warfare operational scenarios for course of action (COA) exploration. These goals are to be accomplished while taking into consideration the number of COAs analyzed/day, the breadth of effects considered, model integration and setup time, number of models integrated and entities run. The models and simulations are to be focused on Cyber COA development and decision support tools. White papers for this topic will be due by: 21 Jun 10. Awards will range 12-24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $100,000 - $865,000. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $43.2M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 11 - $3.7M; FY 12 - $7.6M; FY 13 - $12.1M; FY 14 - $11.4M; and FY15 - $8.4M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 18 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $100K to $1.0M per year. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants or cooperative agreements depending upon the nature of the work proposed. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All potential applicants are eligible. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors are advised that their participation is subject to foreign disclosure review procedures. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors should immediately contact the contracting office focal point, Lynn G. White, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-4996 or e-mail Lynn.White@rl.af.mil for information if they contemplate responding. The e-mail must reference the title and BAA 10-01-RIKA. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. 3. CCR Registration: Unless exempted by 2 CFR 25.110 all offerors must: (a) Be registered in the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) prior to submitting an application or proposal; (b) Maintain an active CCR registration with current information at all times during which it has an active Federal award or an application or proposal under consideration by an agency; and (c) Provide its DUNS number in each application or proposal it submits to the agency. 4. Executive Compensation and First-Tier Sub-contract/Sub-recipient Awards: Any contract award resulting from this announcement may contain the clause at FAR 52.204-10 - Reporting Executive Compensation and First-Tier Subcontract Awards. Any grant or agreement award resulting from this announcement may contain the award term set forth in 2 CFR, Appendix A to Part 25 http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&sid=c55a4687d6faa13b137a26d0eb436edb&rgn=div5&view= text&node=2:1.1.1.41&idno=2#2:1.1.1.4.1.2.1.1 IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal, see Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL/Rome Research Sites "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): A Guide for Industry," April 2007, may be accessed at: http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/Reference%2DNumber%2DBAAGUIDE/listing.html 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit 3 copies of a 3 to 5 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone, fax and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count); Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and reference BAA 10-01-RIKA with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph six of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 11 should be submitted by 1 Oct 2010; FY 12 by 3 Oct 2011; FY 13 by 1 Oct 2012; FY 14 by 1 Oct 2013 and; FY 15 by 1 Oct 2014. White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 30 Sep 2015, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. This BAA will close on 30 Sep 2015. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY, are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: https://www.dss.mil/portal/ShowBinary/BEA%20Repository/new_dss_internet//isp/fac_clear/download_nispom.html. 6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Mr. Jerry Dussault, AFRL/RISC, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505 Electronic submission to Jerry.Dussault@afrl.af.mil will also be accepted. V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: The following criteria, which are listed descending order of importance, will be used to determine whether white papers and proposals submitted are consistent with the intent of this BAA and of interest to the Government: 1) The extent to which the offeror's approach demonstrates an understanding of the problem, an innovative and unique approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology, its application and appropriate levels of readiness at yearly levels. 2) Related Experience - The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge. 3) Openness/Maturity of Solution - The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology in terms of reliability and robustness. 4) Reasonableness and Realism of Proposed Costs - The overall estimated costs should be clearly justified and appropriate for the technical complexity of the effort. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will evaluate the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, and comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a Top Secret facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to Top Secret information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA. Data subject to export control constraints may be involved and only firms holding certification under the US/Canada Joint Certification Program (JCP) (www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp) are allowed access to such data. 3. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offerors will be required to submit their reporting requirement through one of our web-based, reporting systems known as JIFFY or TFIMS. Prior to award, the offeror will be notified which reporting system they are to use, and will be given complete instructions regarding its use. Please note that use of the JIFFY or TFIMS application requires customers outside of the .mil domain to purchase an approved External Certificate Authority certificate to facilitate a secured log on process. It is necessary to obtain an ECA certificate BEFORE obtaining a JIFFY or TFIMS user account. Additional information on obtaining an ECA is available at: http://iase.disa.mil/pki/eca/index.html . VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC Name: Mr. Jerry Dussault Telephone: (315) 330-2067 Email: Jerry.Dussault@afrl.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below: Lynn White Telephone (315) 330-4996 Email: Lynn.White@rl.af.mil The email must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition. In accordance with AFFARS 5301.91, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (Apr 2010) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Susan Hunter Building 15, Room 225 1864 Fourth Street Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937)225-5036; Comm: (937)904-4407 All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.
Added: Jun 20, 2011 7:33 am
The purpose of this modification is to: (1) Incorporate additional
information for the following three focus areas for FY12; and (2)
Changing the FY12 recommended dates for white papers for these three
topic areas.(1) Insert the following three topic areas under I. Funding Opportunity Description: FY 12 Focus Areas: User-Defined Force Presentations: The Air Force needs a powerful and agile method for building new visualization constructs without the long lead time of traditional software development; particularly in cases where non-geospatially based data (data not containing information mapping it to the surface of the Earth), and geospatial data that is better visualized non-geospatially, is becoming more important to the warfighter. The process of traditional application development is slow and laborious, making it ineffective at responding to the pace of technology, imagination, and most importantly, the enemy's evolving modes of warfare. This work will provide a composable visualization capability akin to the Air, Space, and Cyber User Defined Operational Picture (ASC-UDOP), and will also require leveraging of the JView graphical tool set. The specific objectives are to 1) define and develop new rendering constructs that can be instantiated at run-time by operators through a graphical user interface (GUI), and to 2) create ways that allow a user to define components within an application to interact with one another based on event triggers, both those originating from the user and from changes in system state, and to do so dynamically at execution time. White papers for this topic will be due by 13 July 2011. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $350,000-$1,000,000. Synchronized Mission Optimization and Assembly Service: This focus area seeks novel research and development efforts that will result in a prototype capability that will utilize search-optimization algorithms to automatically assemble missions optimized against warfighter defined needs, constraints, and rules of engagement that are coordinated and synchronized across USAF mission elements (air, space, etc.) into unities of effort based on available resources. It will result in a command and control capability that will be able to handle increases in complexity, mitigate uncertainty and increase ops tempo. The Government is anticipating, but not mandating, technical solutions in three main components for this effort. The first of these components will be a dynamic constraint space that will represent asset limitations, warfighter defined needs, priorities and rules of engagement. Every scenario that mission planners encounter is unique. Furthermore, it is typical for conditions to change after task execution has commenced thereby necessitating a change to the constraint space. As a result, the constraints that shape the mission assembly process are complicated, context-sensitive, and change chaotically/asynchronously. In order to truly represent the limitations and boundaries that shape mission and task planning the constraint space will need to be a dynamic, living entity. The second of these components will be the optimization capability that will be used along with the constraint space to build missions that are coordinated, optimized and synchronized across the USAF mission elements. Each optimization approach that has been developed thus far has strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it is likely that the strongest performing optimization approach will be a hybrid that incorporates as many of the strengths and as few of the short comings of existing approaches as possible. The third component involves how the resultant overall capability will fit into the bigger picture. Bidders should be conscious of our increasing focus on service oriented architectures, and the need to leverage the Cornerstone plan representation and services. Offers should demonstrate an understanding of service development and, to the extent reasonable and possible, propose deliverables that are readily deployed as services (i.e., discoverable, well-defined, self-contained modules that are independent of state or context of other services). White papers for this topic will be due by 13 Jul 2011. Awards will not exceed 36 months. Individual awards will normally range between $100K to $1.0M per year. Experience Based Adaptive Replanning: Planning for military operations is notoriously difficult; initial plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy. The Air Force requires technologies that will enable commanders to continuously monitor and adjust plans during their execution as the situation evolves and more relevant and timely information becomes available. To achieve these objectives, we require methods of determining that the executing plan is deviating from its expected performance, establishing deviation thresholds upon which replanning actions should be undertaken, and performing rapid adaptive replanning as necessary to reduce the differential between current state and some desired outcome. Planning under this program is viewed as a sequential decision-making process that iteratively modifies states in a state space. Because we are measuring the current world state, this lends itself towards framing it as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A MDP is represented as a 4-tuple (S, A, T, R), where: S is a set of state variables, A is a set of actions, T is a transition function, and R is the reward function. The state variables comprising S are a set of features representing the world state in which the plan is being executed. The two specific objectives of this focus area are 1) to develop a method of measuring the distance between the state variables and between two or more world states. This is critical for determining whether the plan is going as expected, or deviating from expected performance. 2) to develop a methodology for establishing thresholds for adaptive replanning. Given a method for measuring the deviations in actual plan performance against expected plan performance, the challenge then becomes determining how much of a deviation should be allowed before replanning takes place. This work will research, implement, analyze and compare various methods for achieving these objectives utilizing the Air Force Research Laboratory's Distributed Episodic Exploratory Planning research platform. White papers for this topic will be due by: 1 Aug 2011. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $200,000-$300,000.
Added: Aug 09, 2011 12:51 pm
The purpose of this modification is to notify respondents that all foreign allied participation is excluded at the prime contractor level. All other information remains the same.
Added: Jul 23, 2012 10:12 am
The purpose of this modification is to include the following changes:
(1) Section I Funding Opportunity Description: Add specific focus areas
for FY13. No other changes have been made.(1) Insert the following under Section I: FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: Focus Areas for FY13: The Machine Intelligence for Mission-Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) program will research technologies that enable distributed autonomous assets to make intelligent coordinated adaptations to plans/policies that optimize mission performance in dynamic and realistically complex domains. Emphasis is placed upon autonomous techniques which enable faster, more efficient understanding for complex, multi-modal military data. Our FY13 Focus Areas for MIMFA, with award details, are: Collaborative Agency for Shared Awareness: The objective of this effort is to advance the state of the art related to the tasking, coordination, and negotiation of distributed, heterogeneous agents in complex and/or communication-denied environments. Our domains of interest are high-tempo, data-rich military decision-making situations where the collection, planning, processing, analysis and dissemination of military information leads to decision speed advantage. Target capabilities include the ability to assign software agents to information collection/analysis tasks, share information and conclusions among agents to build team understanding, and self-direct efforts to meet overall mission goals. More specifically, we are interested in answering the following questions: 1. What is the proper way of representing sub-tasks for agents to effectively self-assign to them while ensuring that overall task complexity is properly addressed? 2. What is an effective feedback mechanism to influence autonomy in a positive way? How do agents learn better task selection behavior based on user feedback? 3. What if a user does not agree with a given set of results? 4. What is an effective presentation to a user that will convey a sense of understanding of how an autonomous system is reaching a decision? 5. Can we provide a user with a capability that both increases user effectiveness and increases trust in the autonomous system? White papers for this topic only will be due by: 20 Aug 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: staskevg@rl.af.mil. Classification and State Based Reasoning: The objective of this effort is to develop advanced techniques to focus human attention and machine reasoning on the most important aspects of massive, heterogeneous, or partially observed data sources. This is particularly important for high-speed decision-making environments, such as military intelligence, command and control, planning, and operational scenarios. Our goal is to aid human and machine reasoners to1) Identify and reason over the most significant and discriminating features in that data; 2) Recognize trends and correlations, 3) Robustly handle uncertainty and present information to the user intuitively; 4) Account for changes over time; 5) Present diverse perspectives and interpretations of the data, and 6) Derive dynamic abstractions of state and action spaces while learning a solution to an overall problem. The purpose of this research is to improve the robustness of human understanding and enable more intelligent and faster mission-focused decisions; currently made in a "fog of information," under varying degrees of uncertainty and trust, and with unquantified risk. Some of the approaches of significant interest include: multi-agent approaches to data mining, evolutionary and bio-inspired approaches, information theoretic techniques, supervised and unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, dynamic Bayesian networks, analyzing competing hypothesis from agent perspectives, and the subsequent evaluation of cost functions which are derived from the consideration of multiple approaches for processing the data simultaneously. White papers for this topic only will be due by: 20 Aug 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 12 to 36 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: Misty.Blowers@rl.af.mil. Allother information remains the same.
Added: Aug 03, 2012 9:12 am
The purpose of this modification is to republish the original
announcement, incorporating all previous modifications, pursuant to FAR
35.016(c). This republishing also includes the following changes: (a)
Section IV.5: added new link to DSS; (b) Section VI.2: more detailed
information about export control; (c) Section VI.3: change in reporting
instructions; and (d) Section VII: Agency Contacts: updated information
for the new AFRL Ombudsman. No other changes have been made.NAICS CODE: 541712 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Integrated Command & Control ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 10-01-RIKA CFDA Number: 12.800 I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: Meeting the demands of assigned missions requires unprecedented amount of coordination and synchronization of military resources across all organizations and all echelons of command in all levels of war. It is command and control (C2) that provides the means by which a commander synchronizes and/or integrates force activities in order to achieve the commonly recognized objectives in one unity of effort. These activities require key decisions within the strategy, planning, scheduling and assessment phases of the command and control process. These decisions are made by humans and are supported by computer technology so it is in these areas that information technology contributes the most to ameliorating human capabilities and transforming how the Air Force commands and controls. The goal of the Integrated C2 program is to lead the discovery, development and integration of revolutionary warfighting information technologies that enable continuous and distributed, planning, execution, and assessment of resources across the cyber, air and space domains to achieve commander's intent. Air Force Research Laboratory is seeking innovative white papers to address the following thrusts: • Strategy Development. The functional translation of a commander's conceptual vision and guidance into potential solutions via an adaptive planning capability that supports the generation of a plan of action and seeks to answer the questions of what is to be done and how. By monitoring the plan and operating environment, adapt to evolving situations and represent the necessary actions which incorporate all means available across each of the warfighting domains of the Air Force (air, space and cyber). A key challenge is to understand the complex relationships and dependencies that exist across these domains. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: machine reasoning with uncertain, erroneous, and incomplete information; dynamic causal modeling and multi-criteria analysis summarization; computational efficient mixed initiative planning that balances cognitive and machine load; incorporation of analogical/experiential reasoning (fusion of distributed experiences, capturing knowledge & experience of the past, determining relevancy of past situations); and asynchronous planning on plan fragments versus synchronous "lock and work" planning over multiple iterations. • Synchronized/Integrated Planning. Produce a logistically feasible plan of action to solve the problem, fully integrating subordinate action plans with a description of the role of the other elements of national power in conjunction with military activities. Synchronized/integrated planning includes requests for actions and describes the role of military activities in achieving the desired effects. The integrated "battle" plan enables warfighters to coordinate and synchronize all available forces, kinetic and non-kinetic, to achieve the desired outcomes and exploit opportunities as they present themselves. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: a living plan with "on the fly" action plan/course of action adaptation/mutation that addresses changing conditions of the operational environment; identification, correlation, and advisement on mitigation of external events affecting the processes and mission; continuous adaptive planning; and comprehensive mission-driven situation awareness sharing. • Continuous Assessment. Full spectrum analysis of the attainment of mission objectives at all levels of the campaign (tactical to strategic). At the plan's inception, conduct rigorous examinations of the alternatives and the desired and undesired consequences of each action leading to valuable insight into the actions, causal mechanisms, and effects that support the accomplishment of the objective. Leading indicators or clues can be explicitly identified with their timing which then can be used as a measure of progress towards accomplishing the desired objectives providing the means by which each player understands what is necessary to achieve the overall objectives and the ramifications of their individual actions. Such insights serve to highlight key challenges in sustaining a campaign's progress and are important for synchronizing the force. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: non-deterministic, non-linear causal analysis with reasoning through uncertainty and ambiguity; projective/forward looking analysis through modeling and simulation; use of belief networks within a decision-making environment and how beliefs influence a decision/assessment; dynamic assessment of a-priori and a-posteriori achievement of commander's intent; deliberate causal analysis that identifies key missing data that can be used as information requests; and optimized presentation of complex heterogeneous data. Specific Focus Areas for 2011 Effects Assessment Methodology: Investigate quantitative analysis techniques that aid operational assessors' ability to link actions to effects to desired objectives. The specific goals of this effort are to 1) Explore and assess the mathematical techniques that can be applied to improve the performance of the weighted-additive model under conditions of missing data. Within the additive model the scores produced are directly influenced by the data consumed. Missing data will produce erroneous scores and provide misleading analyses and 2) Investigate techniques that demonstrate invariance under conditions of missing data and identify their utility in operational effects assessment. There may be instances where the derivation or estimation of missing data may not be feasible or appropriate. In addition, weighted-additive models have no ability to detect conditions where the data is erroneous. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 Jun 2010. Awards will not exceed 36 months with dollar amounts ranging from $350,000-$400,000. N-Dimensional Effects-Based Assessment Tools: The objective is to provide operational-level assessors the capability to rapidly develop indicators that assess the Measures of Performance (MoPs) and Measures of Effectiveness (MoEs) of a given plan. The indicators must span the spectrum from strategy-to-task planning, the warfighting domains (air, cyber, and space), and support the near-continuous assessment of effects. Specific goals include: (1) The use of case based reasoning with search algorithms and guidance templates to provide an automated means to assist warfighters in selecting suitable indicators, and (2) The use directed graphs to represent the alignment of operational objectives and effects to assess the achievement of the end-states to provide an intuitive user interface for indicator selection/management and visualizing the assessment. The metrics for this program will include the accuracy and completeness of the set of indicators recommended, improvement in the speed of the process (Δt), and overall quality of the resulting operational assessment. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 June 2010. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $500,000 - $1,000,000. COA Analysis Simulation (CASIM): The objective is to provide the ability to quickly develop simulations to analyze COAs and evaluate capabilities across multiple domains. The goals within this effort are to 1) Integrate disparate models and analysis tools within a federation and 2) Advance and employ an integrated composable modeling and simulation capability to create realistic cyber warfare operational scenarios for course of action (COA) exploration. These goals are to be accomplished while taking into consideration the number of COAs analyzed/day, the breadth of effects considered, model integration and setup time, number of models integrated and entities run. The models and simulations are to be focused on Cyber COA development and decision support tools. White papers for this topic will be due by: 21 Jun 10. Awards will range 12-24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $100,000 - $865,000. Specific Focus Areas for 2012 User-Defined Force Presentations: The Air Force needs a powerful and agile method for building new visualization constructs without the long lead time of traditional software development; particularly in cases where non-geospatially based data (data not containing information mapping it to the surface of the Earth), and geospatial data that is better visualized non-geospatially, is becoming more important to the warfighter. The process of traditional application development is slow and laborious, making it ineffective at responding to the pace of technology, imagination, and most importantly, the enemy's evolving modes of warfare. This work will provide a composable visualization capability akin to the Air, Space, and Cyber User Defined Operational Picture (ASC-UDOP), and will also require leveraging of the JView graphical tool set. The specific objectives are to 1) define and develop new rendering constructs that can be instantiated at run-time by operators through a graphical user interface (GUI), and to 2) create ways that allow a user to define components within an application to interact with one another based on event triggers, both those originating from the user and from changes in system state, and to do so dynamically at execution time. White papers for this topic will be due by 13 July 2011. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $350,000-$1,000,000. Synchronized Mission Optimization and Assembly Service: This focus area seeks novel research and development efforts that will result in a prototype capability that will utilize search-optimization algorithms to automatically assemble missions optimized against warfighter defined needs, constraints, and rules of engagement that are coordinated and synchronized across USAF mission elements (air, space, etc.) into unities of effort based on available resources. It will result in a command and control capability that will be able to handle increases in complexity, mitigate uncertainty and increase ops tempo. The Government is anticipating, but not mandating, technical solutions in three main components for this effort. The first of these components will be a dynamic constraint space that will represent asset limitations, warfighter defined needs, priorities and rules of engagement. Every scenario that mission planners encounter is unique. Furthermore, it is typical for conditions to change after task execution has commenced thereby necessitating a change to the constraint space. As a result, the constraints that shape the mission assembly process are complicated, context-sensitive, and change chaotically/asynchronously. In order to truly represent the limitations and boundaries that shape mission and task planning the constraint space will need to be a dynamic, living entity. The second of these components will be the optimization capability that will be used along with the constraint space to build missions that are coordinated, optimized and synchronized across the USAF mission elements. Each optimization approach that has been developed thus far has strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it is likely that the strongest performing optimization approach will be a hybrid that incorporates as many of the strengths and as few of the short comings of existing approaches as possible. The third component involves how the resultant overall capability will fit into the bigger picture. Bidders should be conscious of our increasing focus on service oriented architectures, and the need to leverage the Cornerstone plan representation and services. Offers should demonstrate an understanding of service development and, to the extent reasonable and possible, propose deliverables that are readily deployed as services (i.e., discoverable, well-defined, self-contained modules that are independent of state or context of other services). White papers for this topic will be due by 13 Jul 2011. Awards will not exceed 36 months. Individual awards will normally range between $100K to $1.0M per year. Experience Based Adaptive Replanning: Planning for military operations is notoriously difficult; initial plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy. The Air Force requires technologies that will enable commanders to continuously monitor and adjust plans during their execution as the situation evolves and more relevant and timely information becomes available. To achieve these objectives, we require methods of determining that the executing plan is deviating from its expected performance, establishing deviation thresholds upon which replanning actions should be undertaken, and performing rapid adaptive replanning as necessary to reduce the differential between current state and some desired outcome. Planning under this program is viewed as a sequential decision-making process that iteratively modifies states in a state space. Because we are measuring the current world state, this lends itself towards framing it as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A MDP is represented as a 4-tuple (S, A, T, R), where: S is a set of state variables, A is a set of actions, T is a transition function, and R is the reward function. The state variables comprising S are a set of features representing the world state in which the plan is being executed. The two specific objectives of this focus area are 1) to develop a method of measuring the distance between the state variables and between two or more world states. This is critical for determining whether the plan is going as expected, or deviating from expected performance. 2) to develop a methodology for establishing thresholds for adaptive replanning. Given a method for measuring the deviations in actual plan performance against expected plan performance, the challenge then becomes determining how much of a deviation should be allowed before replanning takes place. This work will research, implement, analyze and compare various methods for achieving these objectives utilizing the Air Force Research Laboratory's Distributed Episodic Exploratory Planning research platform. White papers for this topic will be due by: 1 Aug 2011. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $200,000-$300,000. Specific Focus Areas for 2013 The Machine Intelligence for Mission-Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) program will research technologies that enable distributed autonomous assets to make intelligent coordinated adaptations to plans/policies that optimize mission performance in dynamic and realistically complex domains. Emphasis is placed upon autonomous techniques which enable faster, more efficient understanding for complex, multi-modal military data. Our FY13 Focus Areas for MIMFA, with award details, are: Collaborative Agency for Shared Awareness: The objective of this effort is to advance the state of the art related to the tasking, coordination, and negotiation of distributed, heterogeneous agents in complex and/or communication-denied environments. Our domains of interest are high-tempo, data-rich military decision-making situations where the collection, planning, processing, analysis and dissemination of military information leads to decision speed advantage. Target capabilities include the ability to assign software agents to information collection/analysis tasks, share information and conclusions among agents to build team understanding, and self-direct efforts to meet overall mission goals. More specifically, we are interested in answering the following questions: 1. What is the proper way of representing sub-tasks for agents to effectively self-assign to them while ensuring that overall task complexity is properly addressed? 2. What is an effective feedback mechanism to influence autonomy in a positive way? How do agents learn better task selection behavior based on user feedback? 3. What if a user does not agree with a given set of results? 4. What is an effective presentation to a user that will convey a sense of understanding of how an autonomous system is reaching a decision? 5. Can we provide a user with a capability that both increases user effectiveness and increases trust in the autonomous system? White papers for this topic only will be due by: 20 Aug 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: staskevg@rl.af.mil. Classification and State Based Reasoning: The objective of this effort is to develop advanced techniques to focus human attention and machine reasoning on the most important aspects of massive, heterogeneous, or partially observed data sources. This is particularly important for high-speed decision-making environments, such as military intelligence, command and control, planning, and operational scenarios. Our goal is to aid human and machine reasoners to1) Identify and reason over the most significant and discriminating features in that data; 2) Recognize trends and correlations, 3) Robustly handle uncertainty and present information to the user intuitively; 4) Account for changes over time; 5) Present diverse perspectives and interpretations of the data, and 6) Derive dynamic abstractions of state and action spaces while learning a solution to an overall problem. The purpose of this research is to improve the robustness of human understanding and enable more intelligent and faster mission-focused decisions; currently made in a "fog of information," under varying degrees of uncertainty and trust, and with unquantified risk. Some of the approaches of significant interest include: multi-agent approaches to data mining, evolutionary and bio-inspired approaches, information theoretic techniques, supervised and unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, dynamic Bayesian networks, analyzing competing hypothesis from agent perspectives, and the subsequent evaluation of cost functions which are derived from the consideration of multiple approaches for processing the data simultaneously. White papers for this topic only will be due by: 20 Aug 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 12 to 36 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: Misty.Blowers@rl.af.mil. All other information remains the same. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $43.2M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 11 - $3.7M; FY 12 - $7.6M; FY 13 - $12.1M; FY 14 - $11.4M; and FY15 - $8.4M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 18 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $100K to $1.0M per year. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants or cooperative agreements depending upon the nature of the work proposed. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All foreign allied participation is excluded at the prime contractor level. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. 3. CCR Registration: Unless exempted by 2 CFR 25.110 all offerors must: (a) Be registered in the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) prior to submitting an application or proposal; (b) Maintain an active CCR registration with current information at all times during which it has an active Federal award or an application or proposal under consideration by an agency; and (c) Provide its DUNS number in each application or proposal it submits to the agency. 4. Executive Compensation and First-Tier Sub-contract/Sub-recipient Awards: Any contract award resulting from this announcement may contain the clause at FAR 52.204-10 - Reporting Executive Compensation and First-Tier Subcontract Awards. Any grant or agreement award resulting from this announcement may contain the award term set forth in 2 CFR, Appendix A to Part 25 http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&sid=c55a4687d6faa13b137a26d0eb436edb&rgn=div5&view=text&node =2:1.1.1.41&idno=2#2:1.1.1.4.1.2.1.1 IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal, see Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL/Rome Research Sites "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): A Guide for Industry," April 2007, may be accessed at: http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/Reference%2DNumber%2DBAAGUIDE/listing.html 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit 3 copies of a 3 to 5 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone, fax and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count); Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and reference BAA 10-01-RIKA with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph six of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 11 should be submitted by 1 Oct 2010; FY 12 by 3 Oct 2011; FY 13 by 1 Oct 2012; FY 14 by 1 Oct 2013 and; FY 15 by 1 Oct 2014. White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 30 Sep 2015, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. This BAA will close on 30 Sep 2015. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY, are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: http://www.dss.mil. 6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Mr. Jerry Dussault, AFRL/RISC, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505 Electronic submission to Jerry.Dussault@afrl.af.mil will also be accepted. V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: The following criteria, which are listed descending order of importance, will be used to determine whether white papers and proposals submitted are consistent with the intent of this BAA and of interest to the Government: 1) The extent to which the offeror's approach demonstrates an understanding of the problem, an innovative and unique approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology, its application and appropriate levels of readiness at yearly levels. 2) Related Experience - The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge. 3) Openness/Maturity of Solution - The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology in terms of reliability and robustness. 4) Reasonableness and Realism of Proposed Costs - The overall estimated costs should be clearly justified and appropriate for the technical complexity of the effort. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will evaluate the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, and comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a Top Secret facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to Top Secret information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA. This acquisition may involve data that is subject to export control laws and regulations. Only contractors who are registered and certified with the Defense Logistics Information Service (DLIS) at http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp/ and have a legitimate business purpose may participate in this solicitation. For questions, contact DLIS on-line at http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp or at the DLA Logistics Information Service, 74 Washington Avenue North, Battle Creek, Michigan 49037-3084, and telephone number 1-800-352-3572. You must submit a copy of your approved DD Form 2345, Militarily Critical Technical Data Agreement, with your Proposal. 3. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offerors will be given complete instructions on the submission process for the reports. VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC Name: Mr. Jerry Dussault Telephone: (315) 330-2067 Email: Jerry.Dussault@afrl.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below: Name: Lynn White Telephone (315) 330-4996 Email: Lynn.White@rl.af.mil The email must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition. In accordance with AFFARS 5301.91, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (Apr 2010) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Ms. Barbara Gehrs AFRL/PK 1864 4th Street Building 15, Room 225 Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937) 656-7321; Comm: (937) 904-4407 All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.
Added: Aug 09, 2012 8:08 am
The purpose of this modification is to: (1) Delete Specific Focus Areas for 2013 which include the topics Collaborative Agency for Shared Awareness and Classification and State Based Reasoning found in Section I. Funding Opportunity Description in its entirety. This section will be amended in the near future. Please keep checking FBO for the updated information for the Specific Focus Areas for 2013. All other information remains the same.
Added: Aug 16, 2012 7:30 am
Machine Intelligence for Mission Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) Integrated C2 BAA Amendment Autonomous systems have the potential to significantly improve the agility and effectiveness of our nation's military while reducing manpower and cost requirements. However, the robustness of current autonomous and automated control technologies is inadequate given the dynamics and complexities of practical real-world problems. The Machine Intelligence for Mission-Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) program will research technologies that enable distributed autonomous assets to make intelligent coordinated adaptations to plans/policies to optimize mission performance in dynamic and realistically complex domains. Emphasis is placed upon autonomous techniques which enable faster, more efficient understanding for complex, multi-modal military data. The ability to autonomously seek out, understand, and present information to human decision makers will contribute greatly to future mission success. General technical areas for this MIMFA program are Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Machine Learning (ML), and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). KDD is the capability to draw conclusions, find specific information, and fine-tune understanding by bringing together large, heterogeneous data sources. ML is the capability for software to adapt its behavior through training or experience to better solve problems. MAS are systems of intelligent software agents interacting to solve highly complex problems, collaborate amongst themselves, and observe and present information on behalf of the human. By combining these three technical areas, we believe there are powerful synergies to be found in helping Command Control Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (C2ISR) operators better understand complex problems and take decisive action. The application context of interest is the Data to Decisions domain and its associated processes. Within this domain the MIMFA program envisions an information spectrum containing various states of information within which we foresee the autonomous multi agent systems working. The first is a dynamic information state which includes self-organizing information collectors. Our goal is to enable the capability for a group of heterogeneous agents to seek mission-relevant information. To accomplish this we wish to advance the science and technology related to the tasking, coordination, self-organization, and negotiation of distributed agents in and amongst the complex domains of air, space, and cyber. Interesting, but not mandated, approaches include extending game theory to reason across the dynamics of individual and group utility to drive agent rationality, as well as both distributed constraint satisfaction and auctioning as mechanisms for self-organization without the need for a central control. The second information state is a static state in which information is at rest in any number of large data sets. The resulting capability required in this state is for a group of heterogeneous agents that can examine data from different perspectives, compare multiple hypotheses, classify important states and features, identify gaps in understanding, and ultimately provide a robust and rational analysis for human decision-makers. Performing this analysis in a timely manner relies upon the agents' ability to dynamically self-adapt their capabilities to new data, as well as understanding and building upon the trust and confidence of human operators. A successful group of agents will operate to answer the commander's need for actionable decision options which take into account multiple perspectives on the data and demonstrate a robust understanding of the problem, potential solutions, risks, and information provenance. Relevant technical areas, but NOT of interest to the MIMFA program at this time include: - Trust - Trust in the output of the autonomous agents should be considered during technology development. While the issue of trust in autonomous agent systems is a major concern, it will be addressed specifically in a subsequent solicitation. - Group/Transfer Learning - Group and transfer learning between heterogeneous multi agent systems is of high importance to the MIMFA program, but will be the addressed specifically in a subsequent solicitation. - Human/Robot Interfaces (HRI) - The MIMFA program plans to leverage, to the maximum extent, previous and existing investments in HRI and agent visualization research. Agent feedback to the human operator is an important capability. Offerors looking to propose HRI or visualization as part of their proposal should consider utilizing existing HRI and visualization capabilities. - Robotic Control - The MIMFA program is not interested in the development of autonomous agent capabilities for control of physical entities such as RPA's and their associated control surfaces. In FY13, the MIMFA program has two major Focus Areas of research, Collaborative Agency for Shared Awareness, and Classification and State Based Reasoning. Within each of these Focus Areas are several associated technical topic areas of interest. Our FY13 Focus Areas for MIMFA, with award details, are: Collaborative Agency for Shared Awareness: Decision makers can be expected to utilize numerous and diverse information gathering assets to gain a clear understanding of a situation prior to making decisions. These assets have the ability to sense and produce massive amounts of data, however, the volume of this data rapidly overwhelms the abilities of human operators to process it all, leading to potential delays in decision making or missed opportunities. This flood of data is further increased due to overlapping information collection duties of multiple assets that cause redundancies in the reported data. The vast quantity of available data can additionally have the negative effect of obscuring gaps in situational awareness (SA), which can lead to poorly informed decisions. Such delays and inaccuracies are unacceptable in dynamic and high-tempo situations. These challenges can be mitigated through self-optimizing information sharing capabilities both among the autonomous agents performing the tasks and between the agents and their operators. Autonomous information systems that are capable of self-optimizing, with regard to a set of objectives, and adapting to evolving conditions are key components to improving the efficiency, agility, and capabilities of our nation's military. Providing situational awareness (SA), a complete but concise description of all relevant information to a commander, is a function of Command and Control (C2) and an application area that will benefit greatly from autonomous systems. Future C2 systems will depend on multiple heterogeneous autonomous systems/agents working together to complete shared and individual tasks that achieve and maintain situational awareness (SA). How these agents will collaborate (agent roles, tasking and re-tasking policies, etc.) under dynamic and adverse conditions remains an open research question and drives this FY13 focus area. Topic areas of interest within the FY13 Collaborative Agency for Shared Awareness Focus Area include: Intelligent Information Sharing - Novel approaches are sought in the area of intelligent information sharing between autonomous agents to provide decision makers with the relevant knowledge needed to make a decision in time for it to have a positive impact on the mission. Several technical objectives of interest fall under this broad challenge and relate to the collection, processing, and dissemination of information amongst a heterogeneous system of collaborative agents in the face of changing objectives and environmental threats. For example, agents need the ability to mine knowledge from their own collected data and represent these findings in a way that can be comprehended by interested parties (as in knowledge transfer). Agents will also need to be able to identify what information should be propagated and to whom; both in pursuit of an agent's individual objectives and to further the objectives shared by all agents in the system. Finally, communication policies to enable information sharing must be developed to allow agents to complete mission objectives in dynamic and contested environments where accessible agents and lines of communication can change over time. The ability of a system of autonomous agents to rapidly identify, obtain, and relay necessary information to a decision maker will be key to revolutionize how military operations are conducted in the future. Autonomous Dynamic Coordination and Tasking - Novel approaches are sought for the coordination, organizational structures, and tasking of autonomous agents to provide superior SA in dynamic and adversarial environments. This topic area will address multiple challenges to achieve its objective: dynamic tasking and re-tasking protocols necessary for the optimal utilization of available resources. Scalable distributed learning algorithms are required to adapt the tasking behaviors of agents as situations evolve. Novel coordination protocols to enable timely and efficient dissemination of relevant information. Additionally, adaptive agent organizational structures that evolve and optimize with changing mission priorities and objectives are of interest. The overall objective or commander's intent shall be defined for the agents. Assumptions regarding knowledge sharing and processing protocols between agents must be clearly outlined. Individual agents may be stochastic and/or deterministic processes, but an aggregate system of agents must be bound by a clearly stated condition and be deterministic in terms of feedback, i.e. provide an answer when a certain condition is met. White papers, for these two topics only, will be due by: 12 Sep 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: Edward.Verenich@rl.af.mil Classification and State Based Reasoning: Our nation's information analysts need access to autonomous intelligent analytic tools that are capable of functioning on large and complex data sets in order to preserve the information superiority of our nation's military. Static data sets today are measuring in size from tera to petabyte ranges and can span several thousand features. Ultimately, autonomous agents will be expected to extract knowledge from several heterogeneous data sets of this magnitude in parallel. Additionally, these agents must function on data sets possessing dynamic qualities, both with respect to growing numbers of samples, varying features, and transient data collection and analysis systems. These autonomous agents will participate in the Planning, Collection, Processing, Analysis, and Dissemination (PCPAD) information flow framework to provide situational awareness (SA), a complete but concise description of all relevant information, to a commander. Of broad interest to this focus area are methods for robust and resilient machine learning (ML). ML is the capability for software to adapt through training or experience to better solve problems. These areas house a diverse set of techniques that can help address the challenges associated with extracting knowledge from complex, real-world data sources. Listed below are three topic areas of interest to the Classification and State Based Reasoning focus area. In each of these topic areas, data sources will be streaming data (either constantly or periodically) and proposed approaches are encouraged to address this. Topic Areas of interest within the FY13 Classification and State Based Reasoning Focus Area include: Problem Abstraction, Reduction, and Reformulation In many cases, available data is too complex for timely processing using data mining and machine learning. This is especially true in highly relational settings and setting with large feature spaces. As a result, conclusions must be drawn from manual inspection or using a significantly smaller subset of the data. This leads to decisions being made without full consideration of the available data. New methods are needed for state abstraction, dimensionality reduction, and problem reformulation, including automatic task decomposition, to compactly represent otherwise large problems and make them applicable to existing data mining and machine learning techniques. Several techniques of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: a) State abstraction; which promotes generalization in learning by sharing knowledge from one system state across all members that belong to the same abstract state. State abstraction approaches should be applicable in on-line learning scenarios and should allow for efficient re-computation as new information becomes available. b) Dimensionality reduction; a collection of techniques that seek to capture all relevant information about a data set and express it using a compact feature set. Proposed dimensionality reduction approaches may include both feature selection and extraction techniques and must address how to identify relevant features over both static and dynamic data sets. c) Problem reformulation; the process by which a complex situation is analyzed and re-expressed into more comprehensible parts to facilitate learning and data mining. Problem reformulation methods should be able to identify and exploit structure in the data or the problem itself either during a static preprocessing phase or in dynamic situations as new information becomes available. Machine Learning in Untrustworthy Environments Machine Learning techniques are emerging as a vital tool for discovering hidden information in data and adapting to complex environments. Increased reliance on these methods introduces challenges that may undermine the effectiveness of automated systems. These challenges include data sources which do not include necessary information (missing data), include inconsistent or noisy data (uncertain data), and data which was deliberately provided to sensors to mislead knowledge discovery agents (adversarial data). The presence of one or more of these data types may reduce the accuracy of outputs, confound the selection of an appropriate action, or evoke the undesirable behavior from an automated learning system. Novel new methods are sought for the hardening of Machine Learning algorithms against incomplete, inaccurate, and/or malicious training data. Desired capabilities include, but are not limited to: a) Support for training data with varied levels of priority, certainty and/or accuracy. These values may change dynamically and should allow for evaluation of different scenarios that cast suspicion on certain data types, data sources, or time intervals. b) Identifying the sufficient conditions and states under which algorithm output(s) will be significantly affected by missing, noisy, or malicious data. Additionally, leverage this information to maintain guaranteed levels of performance. c) Methods for identifying data that may represent a hidden but intentional attack against the algorithm through the injection of data with the purpose of maximizing classification error. Such attacks may originate from a single source or be carried out as a coordinated effort from multiple sources and may be found in static, dynamic, or streaming data. Automated Feature Pre-Processing Machine Learning approaches often require that data is annotated and relevant to the current objective. Annotation of new or unknown data sets can be difficult or infeasible in some situations, especially those where the data sets are dynamic and directed data collection is not possible. Ideally, new data would be pre-processed to identify the context and applicability to current learning objectives without the need for analysis and interpretation by humans. Novel approaches are sought to automate pre-processing of data sets for use in Machine Learning algorithms. Desired capabilities include, but are not limited to: a) Determining the feasibility of exploitation for the given data set. This may include recognizing content type(s) of the possible features, determining if the data set contains enough information to suitably train a given algorithm, or the relevance of the data to the training objectives. b) Identifying the algorithm or ensemble of algorithms that are most likely to be effective based on the features of the data set or environment. Given limited time and/or computational resources, it may be infeasible to process the data using many different approaches. c) Leveraging the outputs from the application of learning algorithms to aid in future selection of algorithms for training on unknown or uncertain features. Such meta-learning approaches should support local learning on a single platform and distributed sharing of learned patterns. White papers, for these three topics only, will be due by: 12 Sep 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: Michael.Corey@rl.af.mil No other changes have been made.
Added: Aug 29, 2013 7:57 am
The purpose of this modification is to republish the original
announcement, incorporating all previous modifications, pursuant to FAR
35.016(c). This republishing also includes the following changes: (a)
Section I: Added new Focus Area for FY14; (b) Section II: Added
information about the rights to select or not select based on funding;
(c) Section III.3: Deleted CCR information and added new SAM
requirements; (d) Section IV.1: Added new URL for BAA Guide to Industry;
(e) Section IV.6 and VII: Changed technical point of contact; (f)
Section IV.7: Added information about possible compromise of classified
information; (g) Section VI.3: Added Data Rights information; and (h)
Changed all "rl.af.mil" email addresses to "us.af.mil" to reflect new
changes to the standard Air Force email addresses. No other changes have
been made.NAICS CODE: 541712 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Integrated Command & Control ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 10-01-RIKA CFDA Number: 12.800 I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: Meeting the demands of assigned missions requires unprecedented amount of coordination and synchronization of military resources across all organizations and all echelons of command in all levels of war. It is command and control (C2) that provides the means by which a commander synchronizes and/or integrates force activities in order to achieve the commonly recognized objectives in one unity of effort. These activities require key decisions within the strategy, planning, scheduling and assessment phases of the command and control process. These decisions are made by humans and are supported by computer technology so it is in these areas that information technology contributes the most to ameliorating human capabilities and transforming how the Air Force commands and controls. The goal of the Integrated C2 program is to lead the discovery, development and integration of revolutionary warfighting information technologies that enable continuous and distributed, planning, execution, and assessment of resources across the cyber, air and space domains to achieve commander's intent. Air Force Research Laboratory is seeking innovative white papers to address the following thrusts: • Strategy Development. The functional translation of a commander's conceptual vision and guidance into potential solutions via an adaptive planning capability that supports the generation of a plan of action and seeks to answer the questions of what is to be done and how. By monitoring the plan and operating environment, adapt to evolving situations and represent the necessary actions which incorporate all means available across each of the warfighting domains of the Air Force (air, space and cyber). A key challenge is to understand the complex relationships and dependencies that exist across these domains. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: machine reasoning with uncertain, erroneous, and incomplete information; dynamic causal modeling and multi-criteria analysis summarization; computational efficient mixed initiative planning that balances cognitive and machine load; incorporation of analogical/experiential reasoning (fusion of distributed experiences, capturing knowledge & experience of the past, determining relevancy of past situations); and asynchronous planning on plan fragments versus synchronous "lock and work" planning over multiple iterations. • Synchronized/Integrated Planning. Produce a logistically feasible plan of action to solve the problem, fully integrating subordinate action plans with a description of the role of the other elements of national power in conjunction with military activities. Synchronized/integrated planning includes requests for actions and describes the role of military activities in achieving the desired effects. The integrated "battle" plan enables warfighters to coordinate and synchronize all available forces, kinetic and non-kinetic, to achieve the desired outcomes and exploit opportunities as they present themselves. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: a living plan with "on the fly" action plan/course of action adaptation/mutation that addresses changing conditions of the operational environment; identification, correlation, and advisement on mitigation of external events affecting the processes and mission; continuous adaptive planning; and comprehensive mission-driven situation awareness sharing. • Continuous Assessment. Full spectrum analysis of the attainment of mission objectives at all levels of the campaign (tactical to strategic). At the plan's inception, conduct rigorous examinations of the alternatives and the desired and undesired consequences of each action leading to valuable insight into the actions, causal mechanisms, and effects that support the accomplishment of the objective. Leading indicators or clues can be explicitly identified with their timing which then can be used as a measure of progress towards accomplishing the desired objectives providing the means by which each player understands what is necessary to achieve the overall objectives and the ramifications of their individual actions. Such insights serve to highlight key challenges in sustaining a campaign's progress and are important for synchronizing the force. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: non-deterministic, non-linear causal analysis with reasoning through uncertainty and ambiguity; projective/forward looking analysis through modeling and simulation; use of belief networks within a decision-making environment and how beliefs influence a decision/assessment; dynamic assessment of a-priori and a-posteriori achievement of commander's intent; deliberate causal analysis that identifies key missing data that can be used as information requests; and optimized presentation of complex heterogeneous data. Specific Focus Areas for 2011 Effects Assessment Methodology: Investigate quantitative analysis techniques that aid operational assessors' ability to link actions to effects to desired objectives. The specific goals of this effort are to 1) Explore and assess the mathematical techniques that can be applied to improve the performance of the weighted-additive model under conditions of missing data. Within the additive model the scores produced are directly influenced by the data consumed. Missing data will produce erroneous scores and provide misleading analyses and 2) Investigate techniques that demonstrate invariance under conditions of missing data and identify their utility in operational effects assessment. There may be instances where the derivation or estimation of missing data may not be feasible or appropriate. In addition, weighted-additive models have no ability to detect conditions where the data is erroneous. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 Jun 2010. Awards will not exceed 36 months with dollar amounts ranging from $350,000-$400,000. N-Dimensional Effects-Based Assessment Tools: The objective is to provide operational-level assessors the capability to rapidly develop indicators that assess the Measures of Performance (MoPs) and Measures of Effectiveness (MoEs) of a given plan. The indicators must span the spectrum from strategy-to-task planning, the warfighting domains (air, cyber, and space), and support the near-continuous assessment of effects. Specific goals include: (1) The use of case based reasoning with search algorithms and guidance templates to provide an automated means to assist warfighters in selecting suitable indicators, and (2) The use directed graphs to represent the alignment of operational objectives and effects to assess the achievement of the end-states to provide an intuitive user interface for indicator selection/management and visualizing the assessment. The metrics for this program will include the accuracy and completeness of the set of indicators recommended, improvement in the speed of the process (Δt), and overall quality of the resulting operational assessment. White papers for this topic will be due by: 23 June 2010. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $500,000 - $1,000,000. COA Analysis Simulation (CASIM): The objective is to provide the ability to quickly develop simulations to analyze COAs and evaluate capabilities across multiple domains. The goals within this effort are to 1) Integrate disparate models and analysis tools within a federation and 2) Advance and employ an integrated composable modeling and simulation capability to create realistic cyber warfare operational scenarios for course of action (COA) exploration. These goals are to be accomplished while taking into consideration the number of COAs analyzed/day, the breadth of effects considered, model integration and setup time, number of models integrated and entities run. The models and simulations are to be focused on Cyber COA development and decision support tools. White papers for this topic will be due by: 21 Jun 10. Awards will range 12-24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $100,000 - $865,000. Specific Focus Areas for 2012 User-Defined Force Presentations: The Air Force needs a powerful and agile method for building new visualization constructs without the long lead time of traditional software development; particularly in cases where non-geospatially based data (data not containing information mapping it to the surface of the Earth), and geospatial data that is better visualized non-geospatially, is becoming more important to the warfighter. The process of traditional application development is slow and laborious, making it ineffective at responding to the pace of technology, imagination, and most importantly, the enemy's evolving modes of warfare. This work will provide a composable visualization capability akin to the Air, Space, and Cyber User Defined Operational Picture (ASC-UDOP), and will also require leveraging of the JView graphical tool set. The specific objectives are to 1) define and develop new rendering constructs that can be instantiated at run-time by operators through a graphical user interface (GUI), and to 2) create ways that allow a user to define components within an application to interact with one another based on event triggers, both those originating from the user and from changes in system state, and to do so dynamically at execution time. White papers for this topic will be due by 13 July 2011. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $350,000-$1,000,000. Synchronized Mission Optimization and Assembly Service: This focus area seeks novel research and development efforts that will result in a prototype capability that will utilize search-optimization algorithms to automatically assemble missions optimized against warfighter defined needs, constraints, and rules of engagement that are coordinated and synchronized across USAF mission elements (air, space, etc.) into unities of effort based on available resources. It will result in a command and control capability that will be able to handle increases in complexity, mitigate uncertainty and increase ops tempo. The Government is anticipating, but not mandating, technical solutions in three main components for this effort. The first of these components will be a dynamic constraint space that will represent asset limitations, warfighter defined needs, priorities and rules of engagement. Every scenario that mission planners encounter is unique. Furthermore, it is typical for conditions to change after task execution has commenced thereby necessitating a change to the constraint space. As a result, the constraints that shape the mission assembly process are complicated, context-sensitive, and change chaotically/asynchronously. In order to truly represent the limitations and boundaries that shape mission and task planning the constraint space will need to be a dynamic, living entity. The second of these components will be the optimization capability that will be used along with the constraint space to build missions that are coordinated, optimized and synchronized across the USAF mission elements. Each optimization approach that has been developed thus far has strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it is likely that the strongest performing optimization approach will be a hybrid that incorporates as many of the strengths and as few of the short comings of existing approaches as possible. The third component involves how the resultant overall capability will fit into the bigger picture. Bidders should be conscious of our increasing focus on service oriented architectures, and the need to leverage the Cornerstone plan representation and services. Offers should demonstrate an understanding of service development and, to the extent reasonable and possible, propose deliverables that are readily deployed as services (i.e., discoverable, well-defined, self-contained modules that are independent of state or context of other services). White papers for this topic will be due by 13 Jul 2011. Awards will not exceed 36 months. Individual awards will normally range between $100K to $1.0M per year. Experience Based Adaptive Replanning: Planning for military operations is notoriously difficult; initial plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy. The Air Force requires technologies that will enable commanders to continuously monitor and adjust plans during their execution as the situation evolves and more relevant and timely information becomes available. To achieve these objectives, we require methods of determining that the executing plan is deviating from its expected performance, establishing deviation thresholds upon which replanning actions should be undertaken, and performing rapid adaptive replanning as necessary to reduce the differential between current state and some desired outcome. Planning under this program is viewed as a sequential decision-making process that iteratively modifies states in a state space. Because we are measuring the current world state, this lends itself towards framing it as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A MDP is represented as a 4-tuple (S, A, T, R), where: S is a set of state variables, A is a set of actions, T is a transition function, and R is the reward function. The state variables comprising S are a set of features representing the world state in which the plan is being executed. The two specific objectives of this focus area are 1) to develop a method of measuring the distance between the state variables and between two or more world states. This is critical for determining whether the plan is going as expected, or deviating from expected performance. 2) to develop a methodology for establishing thresholds for adaptive replanning. Given a method for measuring the deviations in actual plan performance against expected plan performance, the challenge then becomes determining how much of a deviation should be allowed before replanning takes place. This work will research, implement, analyze and compare various methods for achieving these objectives utilizing the Air Force Research Laboratory's Distributed Episodic Exploratory Planning research platform. White papers for this topic will be due by: 1 Aug 2011. Awards will not exceed 24 months with dollar amounts ranging from $200,000-$300,000. Specific Focus Areas for 2013 The Machine Intelligence for Mission-Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) program will research technologies that enable distributed autonomous assets to make intelligent coordinated adaptations to plans/policies that optimize mission performance in dynamic and realistically complex domains. Emphasis is placed upon autonomous techniques which enable faster, more efficient understanding for complex, multi-modal military data. Our FY13 Focus Areas for MIMFA, with award details, are: Collaborative Agency for Shared Awareness: The objective of this effort is to advance the state of the art related to the tasking, coordination, and negotiation of distributed, heterogeneous agents in complex and/or communication-denied environments. Our domains of interest are high-tempo, data-rich military decision-making situations where the collection, planning, processing, analysis and dissemination of military information leads to decision speed advantage. Target capabilities include the ability to assign software agents to information collection/analysis tasks, share information and conclusions among agents to build team understanding, and self-direct efforts to meet overall mission goals. More specifically, we are interested in answering the following questions: 1. What is the proper way of representing sub-tasks for agents to effectively self-assign to them while ensuring that overall task complexity is properly addressed? 2. What is an effective feedback mechanism to influence autonomy in a positive way? How do agents learn better task selection behavior based on user feedback? 3. What if a user does not agree with a given set of results? 4. What is an effective presentation to a user that will convey a sense of understanding of how an autonomous system is reaching a decision? 5. Can we provide a user with a capability that both increases user effectiveness and increases trust in the autonomous system? White papers for this topic only will be due by: 20 Aug 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: gennady.staskevich@us.af.mil. Classification and State Based Reasoning: The objective of this effort is to develop advanced techniques to focus human attention and machine reasoning on the most important aspects of massive, heterogeneous, or partially observed data sources. This is particularly important for high-speed decision-making environments, such as military intelligence, command and control, planning, and operational scenarios. Our goal is to aid human and machine reasoners to1) Identify and reason over the most significant and discriminating features in that data; 2) Recognize trends and correlations, 3) Robustly handle uncertainty and present information to the user intuitively; 4) Account for changes over time; 5) Present diverse perspectives and interpretations of the data, and 6) Derive dynamic abstractions of state and action spaces while learning a solution to an overall problem. The purpose of this research is to improve the robustness of human understanding and enable more intelligent and faster mission-focused decisions; currently made in a "fog of information," under varying degrees of uncertainty and trust, and with unquantified risk. Some of the approaches of significant interest include: multi-agent approaches to data mining, evolutionary and bio-inspired approaches, information theoretic techniques, supervised and unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, dynamic Bayesian networks, analyzing competing hypothesis from agent perspectives, and the subsequent evaluation of cost functions which are derived from the consideration of multiple approaches for processing the data simultaneously. White papers for this topic only will be due by: 20 Aug 2012. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 12 to 36 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: Misty.Blowers@us.af.mil. Specific Focus Area for 2014 This topic announcement describes a research project titled Transfer Learning Approaches for Increased Operational Autonomy, to be executed under the Machine Intelligence for Mission Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) Program for the Air Force Research Laboratory. The overall objective of this project is to develop transfer learning methods to robustly accomplish the transfer of knowledge from previously collected or readily available sources to actively learning agents in multi-agent and dynamic environments. This will speed up the fielding of autonomous intelligent agents capable of performing tasks related to the PCPAD process with less human involvement. The submission of proposals, their evaluation and the placement of research grants and contracts will be carried out as described in the Broad Agency Announcement. Our FY14 Focus Area for MIMFA, with background and award details, are: Intelligent multi-agent systems can be employed to learn and perform various tasks in the Planning and Direction, Collection, Processing and Exploitation, Analysis and Production, and Dissemination (PCPAD) process; however, this ability is limited in adversarial contested environments because of time and environmental data constraints. To address these challenges, we require the capability to use knowledge acquired from previous learning activities to hasten learning of an agent that can perform similar, but different tasks. In order to make such problems more tractable, we believe that a learning technique known as Transfer Learning can be applied. In order for a successful knowledge transfer to take place in multi-agent, contested environments, three broad technical challenges must be addressed: (i) selecting appropriate prior knowledge to learn from, (ii) relating experience to the current situation, and (iii) applying it to the situation at hand. By developing autonomous technologies that meet these challenges, we anticipate that can move towards a fully autonomous process of producing mission capable multi-agent systems and lower the "manpower to value of work" ratio. There have been a number of programs and studies interested in Transfer Learning, the 2005 DARPA Transfer Learning program [1] showed some initial results in speeding up reinforcement learners; however, no methods were applied to the contested or dynamic multi-agent settings that we consider in this project, nor have any of the efforts structured their research around the three steps of knowledge transfer outlined below. The 2005 NIPS workshop and 2006 ICML workshop explored RL techniques that use transfer. A comprehensive survey on transfer between RL tasks is provided by Taylor and Stone [2]; it also acknowledges the need to explore applications of Transfer Learning to multi-agent systems [3]. The transfer of knowledge between learning tasks generally follows the following steps outlined by Taylor and Stone [4], and will be referred to as the "steps of knowledge transfer": a. Given a target task, select an appropriate source task or set of tasks from which to transfer. b. Learn how the source task(s) and target task are related. c. Effectively transfer knowledge from the source task(s) to the target task. Depending on the level of autonomy, an agent must be able to perform all or a subset of these steps and given a set of assumptions from which to operate. In order to improve the "manpower to volume of work" ratio, we will aim for the highest practical level of autonomy that empirical testing will find useful. White papers for this topic only will be due by: 1 Oct 2013. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $1,000,000 per award. Please email your white papers to: edward.verenich.2@us.af.mil. References [1] DARPA. Transfer learning proposer information pamphlet, BAA #05-29, 2005 [2] M. Taylor, P. Stone. Transfer learning for reinforcement learning domains: a survey. Journal of Machine Learning Research, p 1634, 2009. [3] M. Taylor, P. Stone. Transfer learning for reinforcement learning domains: a survey. Journal of Machine Learning Research, p 1675, 2009. M. Taylor, P. Stone. Transfer learning for reinforcement learning domains: a survey. Journal of Machine Learning Research, p 1635, 2009. All other information remains the same. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $43.2M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 11 - $3.7M; FY 12 - $7.6M; FY 13 - $12.1M; FY 14 - $11.4M; and FY15 - $8.4M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 18 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $100K to $1.0M per year. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants or cooperative agreements depending upon the nature of the work proposed. The Government reserves the right to select all, part, or none of the proposals received, subject to the availability of funds. All potential Offerors should be aware that due to unanticipated budget fluctuations, funding in any or all areas may change with little or no notice. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All foreign allied participation is excluded at the prime contractor level. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. 3. System for Award Management (SAM). Offerors must be registered in the SAM database to receive a contract award, and remain registered during performance and through final payment of any contract or agreement. Processing time for registration in SAM, which normally takes forty-eight hours, should be taken into consideration when registering. Offerors who are not already registered should consider applying for registration before submitting a proposal. 4. Executive Compensation and First-Tier Sub-contract/Sub-recipient Awards: Any contract award resulting from this announcement may contain the clause at FAR 52.204-10 - Reporting Executive Compensation and First-Tier Subcontract Awards. Any grant or agreement award resulting from this announcement may contain the award term set forth in 2 CFR, Appendix A to Part 25 http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&sid=c55a4687d6faa13b137a26d0eb436edb&rgn=div5&view=text&node= 2:1.1.1.41&idno=2#2:1.1.1.4.1.2.1.1 IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal, see Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): Guide for Industry," May 2012, may be accessed at: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=e68f832abb3a7341bb7328547c0e19c0&tab= core&_cview=0 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit 3 copies of a 3 to 5 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone, fax and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count); Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and reference BAA 10-01-RIKA with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph six of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 11 should be submitted by 1 Oct 2010; FY 12 by 3 Oct 2011; FY 13 by 1 Oct 2012; FY 14 by 1 Oct 2013 and; FY 15 by 1 Oct 2014. White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 30 Sep 2015, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. This BAA will close on 30 Sep 2015. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY, are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: http://www.dss.mil. 6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Mr. Michael Seifert, AFRL/RISB, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505 Electronic submission to Michael.Seifert@us.af.mil will also be accepted. In the event of a possible or actual compromise of classified information in the submission of your white paper or proposal, immediately but no later than 24 hours, bring this to the attention of your cognizant security authority and AFRL Rome Research Site Information Protection Office (IPO): Bob Kane 315-330-2324 0730-1630 Monday-Friday 315-330-2961 Evenings and Weekends Email: Robert.Kane.7@us.af.mil V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: The following criteria, which are listed descending order of importance, will be used to determine whether white papers and proposals submitted are consistent with the intent of this BAA and of interest to the Government: 1) The extent to which the offeror's approach demonstrates an understanding of the problem, an innovative and unique approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology, its application and appropriate levels of readiness at yearly levels. 2) Related Experience - The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge. 3) Openness/Maturity of Solution - The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology in terms of reliability and robustness. 4) Reasonableness and Realism of Proposed Costs - The overall estimated costs should be clearly justified and appropriate for the technical complexity of the effort. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will evaluate the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, and comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a Top Secret facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to Top Secret information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA. This acquisition may involve data that is subject to export control laws and regulations. Only contractors who are registered and certified with the Defense Logistics Information Service (DLIS) at http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp/ and have a legitimate business purpose may participate in this solicitation. For questions, contact DLIS on-line at http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp or at the DLA Logistics Information Service, 74 Washington Avenue North, Battle Creek, Michigan 49037-3084, and telephone number 1-800-352-3572. You must submit a copy of your approved DD Form 2345, Militarily Critical Technical Data Agreement, with your Proposal. 3. Data Rights: The potential for inclusion of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or data rights other than unlimited on awards is recognized. In accordance with (IAW) the Small Business Administration (SBA) SBIR Policy Directive, Section 8(b), SBIR data rights clauses are non-negotiable and must not be the subject of negotiations pertaining to an award, or diminished or removed during award administration. Issuance of an award will not be made conditional based on forfeit of data rights. If the SBIR awardee wishes to transfer its SBIR data rights to the Air Force or to a third party, it must do so in writing under a separate agreement. A decision by the awardee to relinquish, transfer, or modify in any way its SBIR data rights must be made without pressure or coercion by the agency or any other party. Non-SBIR data rights less than unlimited will be evaluated and negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Government Purpose Rights are anticipated for data developed with DoD-reimbursed Independent Research and Development (IR&D) funding. 4. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offerors will be given complete instructions on the submission process for the reports. VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC Name: Mr. Michael Seifert Telephone: (315) 330-4758 Email: Michael.Seifert@us.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below: Name: Lynn White Telephone (315) 330-4996 Email: Lynn.White@us.af.mil The email must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition. In accordance with AFFARS 5301.91, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (Apr 2010) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Ms. Barbara Gehrs AFRL/PK 1864 4th Street Building 15, Room 225 Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937) 656-7321; Comm: (937) 904-4407 All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.
Added: Oct 02, 2013 2:10 pm
The purpose of this modification is to change the contracting point of
contact. Paragraphs IV.2 and VII are changed as follows:In all instances, please change the following: From: Lynn G. White, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-4996, email Lynn.White@rl.af.mil To: Gail E. Marsh, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-7518, email Gail.Marsh@us.af.mil No other changes have been made.
Added: Oct 18, 2013 2:05 pm
The purpose of this modification is to: (1) Incorporate additional
information for the following two focus areas for FY14; and (2) Changing
the FY14 recommended date for white papers for the C2PD topic area.(1) Insert the following two topic areas under I. Funding Opportunity Description: FY14 Focus Area for Proactive Shaping: This topic announcement describes a research project titled Proactive Shaping, to be executed under the Command and Control of Proactive Defense (C2PD) Program for the Air Force Research Laboratory. The objective of this consolidated program is to orchestrate the dynamic employment of multiple moving-target defense components, configurations and services across the enterprise to assure and empower the mission. The Proactive Shaping project will carve out and address a portion of these objectives in the growing moving-target research area. Specifically, this project will: (1) conduct attack surface analyses of critical services at multiple system levels; (2) characterize several MTDs with specific attributes that define their impact on critical services and mission objectives; and (3) assign and configure the best pairing of MTDs and critical services that minimize attack surfaces and maximize attacker costs. The submission of white papers, their evaluation and the placement of research grants and contracts will be carried out as described in the Broad Agency Announcement. FY14 Focus Areas for C2PD: Today, defenders of computer networks are faced with an asymmetric disadvantage compared to attackers. Attackers are free to study a target network and discover its vulnerabilities at length, and then launch an attack when ready. The sum of the vulnerabilities and attack vectors available to the attacker is termed the 'attack surface'. A leading researcher in the attack surface area defines the components of the attack surface as the methods (e.g. Remote Procedure Calls), channels (e.g. TCP sockets, open ports on network computers or firewalls), and untrusted data items (e.g. database records, registry values) that can be used by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the network [1]. Facing this situation, a defender can protect his network by (i) reducing his network's attack surface, or (ii) periodically 'shifting' the attack surface by changing the methods, channels, and data items available to the attacker as attack vectors. This second option is a developing field of research, where Moving Target Defense (MTD) assets are developed that can shift a network's attack surface for defensive purposes, nullifying the asymmetric time advantage currently enjoyed by the attacker. This proposed project addresses this area of study in three major steps. The first step is to develop a metric for calculating the attack surface of a computer network at three levels; network, host/OS, and application/service. The second step is to develop an algorithm that combines these three attack surface measurements into a single "reachability" metric. This metric will define the "reachability" of the target network, which is proportional to the effort an attacker must expend to breach the network. The third step {future} will be to develop a Command and Control (C2) tool that uses the "reachability" metric to analyze available MTD assets and predict the effect these MTDs will have on the attack surface of a defended network. Additionally, this C2 tool will analyze the effects the MTD has on the availability of the critical services provided by the network. In a live-fire environment, the C2 tool will be able to recommend MTDs for use to protect a network while ensuring that there are no conflicts between deployed MTDs that result in a loss of critical services. At this time we seek white papers addressing the challenges of first two steps described above, to measure an attack surface. It is recommended that white papers be received by the following date to maximize the possibility of an award in FY 14: 18 Nov 2013. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will range in duration from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts up to $500K per award. Please email your white papers to: Bridget.Flatley.1@us.af.mil References [1] Manadhata, K. P., Wing, M. J. "A formal Model for a System's Attack Surface." Moving Target Defense: Creating Asymmetric Uncertainty for Cyber Threats. Springer, 2011, Ch 1, pp. 1-28; [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wing/publications/CMU-CS-07-144.pdf]
Added: Dec 20, 2013 9:42 am
Notice Type: Modification/Amendment The purpose of this modification is to: (1) Insert the following topic area under I. Funding Opportunity Description: Specific Focus Area for FY14 This topic announcement describes a research effort titled "Integrated Command and Control Analysis," to be executed under the Anticipatory Planning consolidated program for the Air Force Research Laboratory. The objective of the consolidated program is to provide commanders and planning staffs of future Air and Space Operation Centers (AOCs) with improved courses of action (COAs) development, analysis and selection capabilities to include means to explore plausible outcomes and recommend new options to take advantage of opportunities or avoid undesired events. The "Integrated Command and Control Analysis" effort(s) will support the overall program objectives by developing a configurable modeling, simulation and analysis tool/environment that is capable of executing various military operationally-relevant experiments, studies and "what if" tradeoffs to determine if a goal or effect can be feasibly met. The submission of proposals, their evaluation and the placement of research grants and contracts will be carried out as described in the Broad Agency Announcement. The FY14 focus area's background and award details are: The Air Force requires the ability to rapidly conduct integrated (air, space & cyber) operational assessments of kinetic and non-kinetic effects. Current strategic planning capabilities lack automation to provide multiple COA options to operators. The complexity and spectrum of operations drives the need for mixed initiative (human/machine) decision aiding that enables comprehensive development of distinct COAs and vigorous analysis to a) determine if commander's intent can be met and at what cost and benefit, b) provide planning staffs with improved course of action development, analysis and selection capabilities to include means to explore plausible outcomes, recommend new options to take advantage of discovered opportunities, avoid undesired effects, etc., and c) evaluate existing or proposed Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) and/or the effects of infusing emerging technologies into military planning/strategizing/execution. The primary objective of this procurement is to provide or develop a modeling, simulation and analysis tool/environment that is capable of executing various military operationally-relevant experiments, studies, "what if" tradeoffs, etc.; for example, conducting an assessment of the effects of employing a range of various strike options in an air interdiction mission, capturing the results, and ultimately conducting after-action (post-simulation) data reduction, analysis and presentation/documentation of relevant findings. A necessary secondary objective is that this delivered simulation environment should also be capable of being reconfigured/recomposed in such a way that it could support not only studies in one domain (for example, the air interdiction study proposed above), but in other, possibly quite dissimilar, domains of interest; for example, assessing the feasibility and benefits of employing swarms of UAVs for real-time ISR. For this procurement, demonstration of the conduct of experiments in two (2) different domains/use cases is required. Particular emphasis will be paid to the simulation environment's ability to be reconfigured to address a variety of questions in (possibly) different domains; with respect to level of extensibility, ease of integration, the degree of interoperability, the time and effort required for model integration and simulation set up time, and so on. The offerer should be prepared to discuss specific reconfiguration approaches that have been or will be employed (e.g., model integration/composition, parameterization, different interoperability protocols, integration techniques, information infrastructures, data sources, etc.), as well as simulation setup (e.g., data and model selection, a Design of Experiments approach, etc.). Finally, inasmuch as the ultimate goal of an IC2 simulation environment is to investigate Integrated C2 COAs, the offeror should address and discuss the simulation design and implementation considerations for how such a combined/multi-domain simulation environment would enable experimentation of the concept of IC2 as a force multiplier; e.g., how one might generate and assess truly Integrated C2 COAs, built using options/assets from across the air-space-cyber domains, or trying to identify potential synergies that might arise by employing the right mix/timing of kinetic/non-kinetic alternatives, and so on. It is recommended that white papers be received by 31 Jan 2014 to maximize the possibility of a 2QFY14 award. Awards will range from 6-12 months, with dollar amounts ranging from $250,000-$600,000. Please email your white papers to: Shelby.Barrett.1@us.af.mil
Added: Feb 06, 2014 10:49 am
The purpose of this modification is to add a new specific focus area
for FY14 to SECTION I-FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION. No other changes
have been made.SPECIFIC FOCUS AREA FOR FY14: Operation Plan Automated Reasoning and Maintenance: The objective of this work is to advance the state of the art related to representing, storing, retrieving, reasoning over, adapting, and maintaining operation plans (OPLANs). Current deliberative planning efforts result in extensive operational plans that represent a snapshot of the world state and are reviewed and adjusted only on a set review cycle or when required in the event of a crisis. Rarely does such a plan remain up-to-date with the many changes to personnel, equipment, and world events. The process to keep these plans up-to-date and relevant is very manual and labor intensive. Because of this, when these plans are retrieved, they often require extensive re-planning efforts that rival those of crisis action planning. Development of successful reasoning capabilities for management and maintenance of operation plans requires three research challenges to be addressed: i) Determination of a principled approach for representing OPLANs, including identifying features to support machine reasoning; ii) Developing similarity metrics and algorithms to compare operation plans and plan fragments to existing plans and fragments; iii) methods for selecting appropriate plan and plan fragments as alternative suggestions and adapting them to the current situation. Interest in this area is restricted to support for model-free approaches to addressing these challenges; i.e. there should be minimal or no reliance on analytical or other models of world behavior. This research should emphasize reuse of previous plans and plan fragments. The work shall consist of two sequential phases: development and specification of a digital representation of OPLANs, and the development of algorithms and methods for computationally operating on OPLANS thus represented. The government is not currently in a position to provide data for this project. Prospective offerors must be able to source their own data sets and archives necessary to support development and demonstration of their technology. While white papers and proposals are required to be unclassified, it is acceptable for research and experiments to be performed in classified environments and for the domains and scenario data to be classified as well. The offeror is responsible for providing appropriately cleared facilities and people for performance of the proposed research. It is anticipated that awards for this particular topic will not exceed 12 months with dollar amount ranging from $350,000-$400,000. Any questions regarding this focus area should be directed to Kurt Lachevet, 315-330-2896. White papers for this topic only will be due by: 28 February 2014. Please email your white papers to: kurt.lachevet@us.af.mil.
Added: Jul 29, 2014 11:22 am
The purpose of this modification is to: 1) Updated Section I to
reflect current requirements; 2) Section III.6 is revised to reflect the
current AFRL Rome Research Site Information Protection Office POC; and
3) Section VII is revised to include the Ombudsman's email address. No
other changes have been made.NAICS CODE: 541712 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Integrated Command & Control ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 10-01-RIKA CFDA Number: 12.800 I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: Meeting the demands of assigned missions requires unprecedented amount of coordination and synchronization of military resources across all organizations and all echelons of command in all levels of war. It is command and control (C2) that provides the means by which a commander synchronizes and/or integrates force activities in order to achieve the commonly recognized objectives in one unity of effort. These activities require key decisions within the strategy, planning, scheduling and assessment phases of the command and control process. These decisions are made by humans and are supported by computer technology so it is in these areas that information technology contributes the most to ameliorating human capabilities and transforming how the Air Force commands and controls. The goal of the Integrated C2 program is to lead the discovery, development and integration of revolutionary warfighting information technologies that enable continuous and distributed, planning, execution, and assessment of resources across the cyber, air and space domains to achieve commander's intent. Air Force Research Laboratory is seeking innovative white papers to address the following thrusts: 1) Strategy Development. The functional translation of a commander's conceptual vision and guidance into potential solutions via an adaptive planning capability that supports the generation of a plan of action and seeks to answer the questions of what is to be done and how. By monitoring the plan and operating environment, adapt to evolving situations and represent the necessary actions which incorporate all means available across each of the warfighting domains of the Air Force (air, space and cyber). A key challenge is to understand the complex relationships and dependencies that exist across these domains. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: machine reasoning with uncertain, erroneous, and incomplete information; dynamic causal modeling and multi-criteria analysis summarization; computational efficient mixed initiative planning that balances cognitive and machine load; incorporation of analogical/experiential reasoning (fusion of distributed experiences, capturing knowledge & experience of the past, determining relevancy of past situations); and asynchronous planning on plan fragments versus synchronous "lock and work" planning over multiple iterations. 2) Synchronized/Integrated Planning. Produce a logistically feasible plan of action to solve the problem, fully integrating subordinate action plans with a description of the role of the other elements of national power in conjunction with military activities. Synchronized/integrated planning includes requests for actions and describes the role of military activities in achieving the desired effects. The integrated "battle" plan enables warfighters to coordinate and synchronize all available forces, kinetic and non-kinetic, to achieve the desired outcomes and exploit opportunities as they present themselves. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: a living plan with "on the fly" action plan/course of action adaptation/mutation that addresses changing conditions of the operational environment; identification, correlation, and advisement on mitigation of external events affecting the processes and mission; continuous adaptive planning; and comprehensive mission-driven situation awareness sharing. 3) Continuous Assessment. Full spectrum analysis of the attainment of mission objectives at all levels of the campaign (tactical to strategic). At the plan's inception, conduct rigorous examinations of the alternatives and the desired and undesired consequences of each action leading to valuable insight into the actions, causal mechanisms, and effects that support the accomplishment of the objective. Leading indicators or clues can be explicitly identified with their timing which then can be used as a measure of progress towards accomplishing the desired objectives providing the means by which each player understands what is necessary to achieve the overall objectives and the ramifications of their individual actions. Such insights serve to highlight key challenges in sustaining a campaign's progress and are important for synchronizing the force. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to: non-deterministic, non-linear causal analysis with reasoning through uncertainty and ambiguity; projective/forward looking analysis through modeling and simulation; use of belief networks within a decision-making environment and how beliefs influence a decision/assessment; dynamic assessment of a-priori and a-posteriori achievement of commander's intent; deliberate causal analysis that identifies key missing data that can be used as information requests; and optimized presentation of complex heterogeneous data. FOCUS AREAS Machine Intelligence for Mission Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) The Machine Intelligence for Mission-Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) program will research technologies that enable distributed autonomous assets to make intelligent coordinated adaptations to plans/policies that optimize mission performance in dynamic and realistically complex domains. Emphasis is placed upon autonomous techniques which enable faster, more efficient understanding for complex, multi-modal military data. Autonomous systems have the potential to significantly improve the agility and effectiveness of our nation's military while reducing manpower and cost requirements. However, the robustness of current autonomous and automated control technologies is inadequate given the dynamics and complexities of practical real-world problems. The Machine Intelligence for Mission-Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) program will research technologies that enable distributed autonomous assets to make intelligent coordinated adaptations to plans/policies to optimize mission performance in dynamic and realistically complex domains. Emphasis is placed upon autonomous techniques which enable faster, more efficient understanding for complex, multi-modal military data. The ability to autonomously seek out, understand, and present information to human decision makers will contribute greatly to future mission success. General technical areas for this MIMFA program are Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Machine Learning (ML), and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). KDD is the capability to draw conclusions, find specific information, and fine-tune understanding by bringing together large, heterogeneous data sources. ML is the capability for software to adapt its behavior through training or experience to better solve problems. MAS are systems of intelligent software agents interacting to solve highly complex problems, collaborate amongst themselves, and observe and present information on behalf of the human. By combining these three technical areas, we believe there are powerful synergies to be found in helping Command Control Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (C2ISR) operators better understand complex problems and take decisive action. The application context of interest is the Data to Decisions domain and its associated processes. Within this domain the MIMFA program envisions an information spectrum containing various states of information within which we foresee the autonomous multi agent systems working. The first is a dynamic information state which includes self-organizing information collectors. Our goal is to enable the capability for a group of heterogeneous agents to seek mission-relevant information. To accomplish this we wish to advance the science and technology related to the tasking, coordination, self-organization, and negotiation of distributed agents in and amongst the complex domains of air, space, and cyber. Interesting, but not mandated, approaches include extending game theory to reason across the dynamics of individual and group utility to drive agent rationality, as well as both distributed constraint satisfaction and auctioning as mechanisms for self-organization without the need for a central control. The second information state is a static state in which information is at rest in any number of large data sets. The resulting capability required in this state is for a group of heterogeneous agents that can examine data from different perspectives, compare multiple hypotheses, classify important states and features, identify gaps in understanding, and ultimately provide a robust and rational analysis for human decision-makers. Performing this analysis in a timely manner relies upon the agents' ability to dynamically self-adapt their capabilities to new data, as well as understanding and building upon the trust and confidence of human operators. A successful group of agents will operate to answer the commander's need for actionable decision options which take into account multiple perspectives on the data and demonstrate a robust understanding of the problem, potential solutions, risks, and information provenance. Relevant technical areas, but NOT of interest to the MIMFA program at this time include: 1) Trust - Trust in the output of the autonomous agents should be considered during technology development. While the issue of trust in autonomous agent systems is a major concern, it will be addressed specifically in a subsequent solicitation (planned start in FY15). 2) Group/Transfer Learning - Group and transfer learning between heterogeneous multi agent systems is of high importance to the MIMFA program, but will be the addressed specifically in a subsequent solicitation (planned start in FY14). 3) Human/Robot Interfaces (HRI) - The MIMFA program plans to leverage, to the maximum extent, previous and existing investments in HRI and agent visualization research. Agent feedback to the human operator is an important capability. Offerors looking to propose HRI or visualization as part of their proposal should consider utilizing existing HRI and visualization capabilities. 4) Robotic Control - The MIMFA program is not interested in the development of autonomous agent capabilities for control of physical entities such as RPA's and their associated control surfaces. Specific Focus Area for 2015 Trusted Autonomy and Verification and Validation (V&V) This focus area describes a research project entitled "Trusted Autonomy and Verification and Validation (V&V)," to be executed under the Machine Intelligence for Mission Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) Program for the Air Force Research Laboratory. The autonomous software systems envisioned by the U.S. Air Force - particularly confederations of autonomous agents in complex, dynamic environment (such as a group of heterogeneous UAVs performing an ISR mission) - can be expected to manifest emergent behaviors unpredicted by their designers. Recognition, prediction, and control of these unexpected behaviors are potential obstacles in the critical path to the successful fielding of these systems. The overall objective of this project is to secure a foundation for trusted autonomy through development of advanced modeling, simulation, analysis, test, and design techniques for test, evaluation, verification, and validation (TEV&V) of autonomous systems. Topic areas of interest within the FY15 Trusted Autonomy and V&V Focus Area include: Detection of Unexpected/Emergent Behavior. Emergent behaviors are usually discovered "post-mortem" by simple inspection of a (real or simulated) system [1]. It is relatively straightforward to develop tests for detecting any specific behavior; however, detection of arbitrary, unexpected emergent behavior as it occurs, without reference to visual inspection, is considerably more challenging. A possible approach is the adoption of an extensive domain-specific emergent-behavior taxonomy detailing unique behaviors seen in complex systems, along with a battery of tests for each specific behavior [2], [3]. Broader anomaly detection might also be accomplished by judicious measurements of global properties; for instance, Fourier analysis of system dynamics in search of unexpected periodicity [4], or statistical sampling of resource allocations to detect departures from expected fairness [2]. Because many envisioned multi-agent systems are decentralized, loosely-coupled federations, emergent behavior detection logic should require as few agents and as little communication as possible. This topic encompasses all tasks required to detect both specific and arbitrary emergent behaviors in an autonomous system, including but not limited to: 1) Development of domain-specific emergent behavior taxonomies. 2) Abstraction of specific behaviors into classes, and development of correspondingly broader detection logic. 3) Development of test for each identified possible EB or class. 4) Mapping of specific global behaviors above to purely local behavioral bounds. For instance, a single agent might raise an alert when it detects that it is being tasked to fly over the same area more frequently than expected, that it is undergoing collision avoidance frequently, or that it is being starved of a necessary resource. (Due to the global nature of emergent behaviors, such purely local observations will not suffice to detect all behaviors in the catalog. 5) Mapping of specific emergent behaviors to behavioral bounds over a limited subsets of agents; for instance, allowing an agent to consider the positions of its immediate neighbors. 6) Development of efficient algorithms for propagation of global state among UAVs to detect remaining behaviors that cannot be discovered locally. Control of Unexpected/Emergent Behaviors. Following detection of an unexpected and potentially detrimental behavior, the system must work to correct the behavior. This challenge is amplified in a large multi-agent system, particularly when direct communication with all agents is not possible. A possible approach to the problem is a top-down design for trust that guarantees that the system cannot enter undesirable states. Run-Time Assurance (RTA) [5] (or the closely-related Simplex architecture [6], [7]) is such a solution, employing a real-time watchdog module to detect out-of-bounds behavior and transfer control to a backup, trusted legacy controller. This topic encompasses all techniques for returning the multi-agent system to a safe state following detection of unexpected emergent behaviors. Subtasks may include: 1) Development of provably correct hierarchical safety architectures and distributed detection protocols for broad classes of behaviors. 2) Protocols and algorithms for extension of the RTA architecture to a distributed, multi-agent case. 3) Distributed communication protocols for introducing rapid behavioral change in a multi-agent system. 4) Incorporation of low-bandwidth influence techniques to control swarm behavior via manipulation of a limited subset of individuals [8]. Prediction of Unexpected/Emergent Behaviors. Historically, modeling and simulation of a system is the only way to predict emergent behaviors ahead of deployment. Because simulations of complex, high-state space cyber-physical systems cannot be exhaustive (and will in any case fail to capture all possible couplings between the system and its environment), they cannot make formal guarantees. To achieve high confidence that multi-agent systems will not exhibit unwanted emergent behaviors, we would like to analyze the system formally such that 1) the possible range of behaviors the system might take are formally circumscribed; and/or 2) specific unwanted behaviors are proven impossible. Formal methods of analysis prove desirable properties of a software system based on a formal specification (for instance, in temporal logic) [9]. Traditional formal methods apply to single-threaded algorithms; newer techniques for concurrent, multi-agent systems continue to be developed [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]. This topic encompasses techniques for predicting latent emergent behavior before system fielding via efficient modeling, simulation, analysis, and test, including formal guarantees of the absence of specific behaviors or classes of behaviors. Subtasks may include: 1) Development of efficient simulation/test techniques for autonomous systems, including dimensionality-reduction or other approximation techniques to reduce state space. 2) Development of comprehensive executable environmental models incorporating rare events and specific known emergent behavior triggers. 3) Development of heuristic (informal) signature-based techniques for recognizing design factors correlated with particular behaviors in an emergent behavior taxonomy. 4) Application of concurrent formal methods to provide formal guarantees of the absence of specific emergent behaviors or behavior classes. Expected end deliverables for this focus area include models, simulations, and algorithms. White papers for this focus area are due by September 15, 2014. It is anticipated that awards for this focus area will range from 9 to 24 months with dollar amounts nominally up to $500,000 per award. Please email your white papers to Ryan Turner, 315-330-4831, ryan.turner.10@us.af.mil. Works Cited: [1] C. a. Y. M. T. Szabo, "Post-mortem Analysis of Emergent Behavior in Complex Simulation Models," in SIGSIM-PADS '13, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2013. [2] J. Mogul, "Emergent (Mis)Behavior vs. Complex Software Systems," Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P., Palo Alto, CA, 2006. [3] R. a. P. F. R. Gore, "An Exploration-Based Taxonomy for Emergent Behavior Analysis In Simulations," in Proceedings of the 2007 Winter Simulation Conference, 2007. [4] H. V. D. a. R. V. Parunak, "Managing Emergent Behavior in Distributed Control Systems," in ISA-Tech, Anaheim, CA, 1997. [5] M. Clark, "A Study of Run-Time Assurance for Complex Cyber-Physical Systems," 2013. [6] J. G. A. D. C. W. L. S. a. M. G. Rivera, "An Architectural Description of the Simplex Architecture," Carnegie Mellon University, 1996. [7] L. Sha, "Using Simplicity to Control Complexity," IEEE Software, July/August 2001. [8] D. Brown, Limited Bandwidth Interactions with Bio-Inspired Swarms, 2014. [9] M. Ouimet, "Formal Software Verification: Model Checking and Theorem Proving," Embedded Systems Laboratory, MIT. [10] B. a. J. E. Chaki, "Model-Driven Verifying Compilation of Synchronous Distributed Applications," Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburge, PA, 2014. [11] S. Chaki, Software Model Checking for Verifying Distributed Algorithms, 2013. [12] B. Chazelle, "Natural Algorithms and Influence Systems," Communications of the ACM, vol. 55, no. 12, 2012. [13] B. Chazelle, "The Dynamics of Influence Systems," arXiv, 2012. [14] P. a. C. R. Haglich, "Detecting Emergent Behaviors with Semi-Boolean Algebra," in AIAA Infotech, Atlanta, GA, 2010. [15] A. Kubik, "Towards a Formalization of Emergence," Journal of Artificial Life, vol. 9, pp. 41-65, 2003. [16] A. Platzer, "Logics of Dynamic Systems," in 27th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 2012. [17] C. e. a. Rouff, "Formal Approaches to Intelligent Swarms," Proceedings of the 28th Annual NASA Goddard Software Engineering Workshop, 2003. [18] Y. M. B. L. L. a. C. S. Teo, "Formalization of Emergence in Multi-agent Systems," in SIGSIM-PADS '13, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2013. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $43.2M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 11 - $3.7M; FY 12 - $7.6M; FY 13 - $12.1M; FY 14 - $11.4M; and FY15 - $8.4M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 18 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $100K to $1.0M per year. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants or cooperative agreements depending upon the nature of the work proposed. The Government reserves the right to select all, part, or none of the proposals received, subject to the availability of funds. All potential Offerors should be aware that due to unanticipated budget fluctuations, funding in any or all areas may change with little or no notice. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All foreign allied participation is excluded at the prime contractor level. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. 3. SYSTEM FOR AWARD MANAGEMENT (SAM). Offerors must be registered in the SAM database to receive a contract award, and remain registered during performance and through final payment of any contract or agreement. Processing time for registration in SAM, which normally takes forty-eight hours, should be taken into consideration when registering. Offerors who are not already registered should consider applying for registration before submitting a proposal. 4. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION AND FIRST-TIER SUB-CONTRACT/SUB-RECIPIENT AWARDS: Any contract award resulting from this announcement may contain the clause at FAR 52.204-10 - Reporting Executive Compensation and First-Tier Subcontract Awards. Any grant or agreement award resulting from this announcement may contain the award term set forth in 2 CFR, Appendix A to Part 25 http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&sid=c55a4687d6faa13b137a26d0eb436edb&rgn=div5&view=text& node=2:1.1.1.41&idno=2#2:1.1.1.4.1.2.1.1 IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal, see Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): Guide for Industry," May 2012, may be accessed at: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=e68f832abb3a7341bb7328547c0e19c0&tab =core&_cview=0 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit 3 copies of a 3 to 5 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone, fax and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count); Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and reference BAA 10-01-RIKA with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph six of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 11 should be submitted by 1 Oct 2010; FY 12 by 3 Oct 2011; FY 13 by 1 Oct 2012; FY 14 by 1 Oct 2013 and; FY 15 by 1 Oct 2014 unless otherwise specified. White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 30 Sep 2015, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. This BAA will close on 30 Sep 2015. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY, are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: http://www.dss.mil. 6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Mr. Michael Seifert, AFRL/RISB, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505 Electronic submission to Michael.Seifert@us.af.mil will also be accepted. In the event of a possible or actual compromise of classified information in the submission of your white paper or proposal, immediately but no later than 24 hours, bring this to the attention of your cognizant security authority and AFRL Rome Research Site Information Protection Office (IPO): Vincent Guza 315-330-4048 0730-1630 Monday-Friday 315-330-2961 Evenings and Weekends Email: vincent.guza@us.af.mil V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: The following criteria, which are listed descending order of importance, will be used to determine whether white papers and proposals submitted are consistent with the intent of this BAA and of interest to the Government: 1) The extent to which the offeror's approach demonstrates an understanding of the problem, an innovative and unique approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology, its application and appropriate levels of readiness at yearly levels. 2) Related Experience - The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge. 3) Openness/Maturity of Solution - The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology in terms of reliability and robustness. 4) Reasonableness and Realism of Proposed Costs - The overall estimated costs should be clearly justified and appropriate for the technical complexity of the effort. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will evaluate the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, and comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a Top Secret facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to Top Secret information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA. This acquisition may involve data that is subject to export control laws and regulations. Only contractors who are registered and certified with the Defense Logistics Information Service (DLIS) at http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp/ and have a legitimate business purpose may participate in this solicitation. For questions, contact DLIS on-line at http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp or at the DLA Logistics Information Service, 74 Washington Avenue North, Battle Creek, Michigan 49037-3084, and telephone number 1-800-352-3572. You must submit a copy of your approved DD Form 2345, Militarily Critical Technical Data Agreement, with your Proposal. 3. DATA RIGHTS: The potential for inclusion of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or data rights other than unlimited on awards is recognized. In accordance with (IAW) the Small Business Administration (SBA) SBIR Policy Directive, Section 8(b), SBIR data rights clauses are non-negotiable and must not be the subject of negotiations pertaining to an award, or diminished or removed during award administration. Issuance of an award will not be made conditional based on forfeit of data rights. If the SBIR awardee wishes to transfer its SBIR data rights to the Air Force or to a third party, it must do so in writing under a separate agreement. A decision by the awardee to relinquish, transfer, or modify in any way its SBIR data rights must be made without pressure or coercion by the agency or any other party. Non-SBIR data rights less than unlimited will be evaluated and negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Government Purpose Rights are anticipated for data developed with DoD-reimbursed Independent Research and Development (IR&D) funding. 4. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offerors will be given complete instructions on the submission process for the reports. VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC Name: Mr. Michael Seifert Telephone: (315) 330-4758 Email: Michael.Seifert@us.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below: Name: Gail Marsh Telephone (315) 330-7518 Email: gail.marsh@us.af.mil The email must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition. In accordance with AFFARS 5301.91, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (Apr 2010) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Ms. Barbara Gehrs AFRL/PK 1864 4th Street Building 15, Room 225 Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937) 656-7321; Comm: (937) 904-4407 Email: barbara.gehrs@us.af.mil All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.
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General Information
Notice Type:
Presolicitation
Original Posted Date:
March 8, 2010
Posted Date:
July 29, 2014
Response Date:
-
Original Response Date:
-
Archiving Policy:
Manual Archive
Original Archive Date:
-
Archive Date:
-
Original Set Aside:
N/A
Set Aside:
N/A
Classification Code:
A -- Research & Development
NAICS Code:
541 -- Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services/541712 --
Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences
(except Biotechnology)
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