Description
The US Forest Service, Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station, intends to issue a sole source Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for software upgrade to the EMDS System to Mountain View Business Group, LLC, Upland, CA. EMDS is a spatially enabled decision support technology for environmental analysis and planning that runs as a component of the ArcGIS 10.x geographic information system (GIS) platform. EMDS itself is made up of a collection of proprietary components, including a logic engine (from Rules of Thumb, Inc.), a decision engine (from InfoHarvest, Inc.), and the EMDS Core (under the management of Mountain View Business Group, LLC). The companies and the USFS collectively manage the EMDS Consortium, which oversees maintenance and development of the EMDS system. This IDIQ contract covers the design and implementation of the next three versions of EMDS (versions 5, 6, and 7). Major system enhancements to the EMDS Core over the next three versions of the system include: 1. Code optimization and support for parallel processing, resulting in 10- to 100-fold speed increase in computationally intensive processes. 2. Re-engineering of database management components to increase record handling from a current limit of about 15,000 features (spatial records) to approximately 1,000,000 features. Support for SDE and other commonly used corporate spatial data platforms are also part of this enhancement. 3. Implementation of provenance tracking. All user interactions with the system are tracked. Provenance tracking provides complete documentation of all analytical steps, assuring that highly complex analyses can be faithfully reproduced at a later time or by third parties. Provenance tracking also enables users to roll back any desired number of steps in a complex analytical process and pivot to new pathways. 4. Implementation of a workflow interface. At version 5.0, EMDS itself will be fully re-architected as workflows, using the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF, open source from Microsoft Research). Workflow management will be implemented in Trident (an open source third party user interface to the WWF implemented by NOAA and collaborators). With the workflow interface, system users will be able to 1) customize EMDS process steps, 2) more easily introduce new plug-in components (e.g., other engines such as a prolog engine or Bayesian network engine) to extend the functionality of the base system, and 3) highly automate pre- and post-processing GIS operations which are otherwise often a major bottleneck to complex spatial analyses. 5. Somewhat later in the overall development plan, implementation of an enterprise version that will enable many EMDS components to run as web services, including delivery of a web interface to EMDS products produced in its standard desktop environment. Design and implementation of the EMDS Core was performed by the Redlands Institute (University of Redlands, Redlands, CA) from 2005 to mid-2014 as a member of the EMDS Consortium. The Institute closed in June 2014, and responsibility for design and implementation of the EMDS Core was transferred to the Mountain View Business Group because its senior software engineer had been the senior EMDS system software engineer overseeing EMDS development for the Redlands Institute. A very high level of software engineering expertise is needed to support the design and implementation of the EMDS Core because the Core is an integrating component for three other software systems, each of which is highly complex in its own right. Moreover, the knowledge to manage the Core design is extremely specific to the collection of systems and components that make up EMDS. Over the course of four generations of EMDS development, the project manager (Dr. Keith M Reynolds, PNW Research Station) estimates that software engineers typically require 6-12 months of experience with the system environment before they have enough proficiency to design efficiently and effectively. This action is taken pursuant to 41 U.S.C. 253(c) (1) as implemented by FAR 6.302-1, only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy the agency requirements.