Notice Type: Request for Information Solicitation: Agency/Office: Washington Headquarters Service Location: WHS Acquisition and Procurement Office Title: Application of Advanced Mathematics to DOD Challenges This is a Request For Information (RFI), to gain knowledge of interest and capabilities. THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR PROPOSALS. The Government DOES NOT intend to award a contract on the basis of the responses to this RFI. No reimbursement will be made for any costs associated with providing information in response to this synopsis or any follow-up information requests. This RFI is for planning purposes only and to gain knowledge regarding the existence of companies, colleges and universities capable of satisfying these requirements. Responses to this RFI will not be returned. Information received in response to this RFI may be used to assess alternatives available in determining how to proceed in future acquisitions, and members of the Director of Joint Interoperability staff may follow up to learn more about submissions of interest. Not responding to the RFI does not preclude participation in any future RFP. If a solicitation is released, it will be issued via the Federal Business Opportunities website (www.fbo.gov). It is the responsibility of the potential offerors to monitor this website for any information that may pertain to this RFI. The information provided in this RFI is subject to change and is not binding on the Government. (a) The Government does not intend to award a contract on the basis of this solicitation or to otherwise pay for the information solicited except as an allowable cost under other contracts as provided in subsection 31.205-18, Bid and proposal costs, of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). (b) Although “proposal”, “contractor”, and “offeror” are used in this Request for Information, your response will be treated as information only. It shall not be used as a proposal. (c) This solicitation is issued for the purpose of gaining information to be used in determining the scope of future Virtualization-Based Security Tools contracts. This RFI is a part of Market Research in accordance with FAR Part 10, FAR 12.101 and FAR 12.202. Proprietary information shall not be submitted in response to this RFI. All information submitted in response to this RFI shall be treated as non-proprietary. 1.0 Background The Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) has established a Technology Focus Team to assess the application of advanced mathematics to a number of DoD challenges. The Department of Defense (DoD) has a critical need to apply and further advanced mathematics to our most pressing battlefield challenges, and develop new mathematics for the challenges of tomorrow. In order to address critical shortcomings associated with joint and coalition identification and tracking capabilities, the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) established a Technology Focus Team to assess the application of advanced mathematics to a number of DoD challenges. These include: optimal sensor fusion for real-time target identification, feature extraction from dynamic data sets, novel visualization techniques in order to speed analysis of massive data, and battlefield identification. 1.1 Intent of the RFI It is the intent of the DDR&E office to use this market research to develop recommendations for relevant state of the art and state of practice mathematical techniques that would significantly improve warfighting capability in these areas and to address critical warfighting capability gaps. 2.0 Requirements 2.1 Description of the problem Keeping track of the dense, cluttered battlespace, with fixed and movable objects, where enemy forces are frequently closely mingled with civilians, as well as tracking such things as Improved Explosive Devices (IED’s), Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), ground vehicles and dismounted soldiers is a difficult challenge for warfighters. US forces have a large number of sensors to keep track of enemy, friendly, and neutral battlefield objects. These generate a variety of data types, such as: video, radar, infrared, acoustic, electronic intelligence, and others. Data generated by one sensor often needs to be correlated with data from other sensors, especially if the data generated by the other sensor is of different types (e.g., video and acoustic). The difficulty of managing all this data is increased by the fact that some of this data needs further processing in order to give unambiguous, time stamped, tracks and target state vectors. The Joint Warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan has been described as having the problem of “swimming in sensors and drowning in data.” The lack of coherence among these systems can result in a confused, ambiguous “picture” of the battlefield, and the abundance of data has resulted in throwing some data away just to make screens readable. 2.2 Description of solution characteristics To address this Joint Warfighter problem, the DoD is looking for recommendations for specific applications of advanced mathematics to manage and extract features from massive dynamic data sets, particularly pertaining to techniques that account for sparse, misordered, late arriving data, and missing data, to support identification and tracking of all objects in the battlespace. Recommendations should include specific techniques for filtering, fusing, and visualizing high dimensional data sets. To help the Joint Warfighter, some of the issues these advanced mathematical techniques should be designed to address include: - Improved situational awareness o Do the objects exist? o What are the objects (identification)? Friend, Neutral, Hostile, Unknown? o Where are the objects? With what certainty? Where are they headed? At what speed, in what direction, at what altitude, at what precise time, etc o What is the intent of the objects? o What is the history of the objects? o Has a key “event” occurred? o What is the significance of the event? o What are the relationships between the objects, the events and the objects and events? - Effective cueing: o Same as Situational Awareness, but with a sufficiently low latency that supports engagement decisions o Requires updates to data on a continuous or rapid basis vs. slower updates ranging from minutes to seconds that is sufficient for situational awareness. - Effective targeting: o Same as Situational Awareness, but with a sufficiently low latency that supports engagement decisions and weapons targeting o Requires updates to data on a continuous or rapid basis vs. slower updates ranging from minutes to seconds that is sufficient for situational awareness. - Provide a clear, continuous, unambiguous “picture” of the battlespace: o Clear, tracks have one track per target o Continuous: tracks that do not “drop” (e.g., by fusing multiple sensors, one sensor may “fill in” where another cannot see) o Unambiguous: certain identification o Additionally, error correction from look angles, etc must be accounted for. - Provide the ability to make shoot/no-shoot decisions on a large volume of uncorrelated, raw data, with uncertain and unassociated or misordered data - Provide significant improvement in multi-sensor association, correlation, and/or fusion, depending on the intended use (e.g., for cueing, targeting, etc.) 2.3 Connecting Operational Challenges to Potential Mathematical Solutions - A summary listing of the operational challenges warfighters face includes: o Tracking o Object Identification o Sensor Cuing o Determination of Object Intent o Distributed systems of diverse sensors o Sensor constraints (field of view, refresh rates, resolution, etc.) o Volume/diversity/distribution of data o Operator cognitive constraints o Constrained communications o Constrained platform computing capabilities - Some examples of possible applications of mathematical techniques to operational challenges include: Area of Focus Problem (Application) Data Fusion Target Tracking – Low/Slow Air Target Tracking – Ground Movement Combat ID Compressive Sensing Signal Reconstruction Fusion Performance Assessment Fusion for classification & separation of sources Fusion for reconstruction Context understanding Information Extraction/ Data Interpretation Target Tracking – Low/Slow Air Target Tracking – Ground Movement Combat ID Signal Reconstruction Recognition of Groups of Related Entities Determination of Intent Navigation and Reconnaissance Object recognition and categorization Scene Understanding and Interpretation Description of Events Prediction Stochastic Networks and Dynamical Systems Strategy Development / Alternative Plans Plan prediction Group Coordination Data Presentation/ Visualization Data Manipulation & Querying Information Management Information Evolution, Dynamics of Information High-level, Dynamic Learning and Reasoning Construction of High-level Representation of Information Information Integration (interoperability) Reuse and Update Current Systems Information Flow and Exchange Sensor Data & Network Architectures Coverage Guarantees and Hole Detection Sleep/Wake scheduling for sensor networks Dynamic network topology Quality of service Network vulnerability 3.0 Instructions for Responses to this Request for Information (RFI) - Respondents to this Request for Information should provide a paper 2-5 pages in length per mathematical technique that: o Describes the technique o Identifies the battlefield challenge(s) it can address (i.e., application) o Provides an estimate of the priority that should be given to the development of the technique (and rationale) o Provides an estimate of actions and/or (additional) funding required to mature the technique to where it would be ready for use o Provides an estimate of how soon the technique could be ready for field use - Emphasis should be placed on those techniques that can be made available within several months to a couple years, rather than longer term efforts. - Proprietary information shall not be submitted in response to this RFI. All information submitted in response to this RFI shall be treated as non-proprietary. - All responses should be submitted via e-mail address to
[email protected] and
[email protected] no later than 12:00 noon on March 12th, 2010. - Points of Contact: o John MacCarthy, Phone 703-614-1210 o Steve Biernesser, Phone 703-695-9885