AFRL announces new funding opportunity

On January 21, the Air Force Research Laboratory issued a broad agency announcement (BAA RIK-2015-0002) in search of applications for information reporting (AIR). Please note that FY15 white papers are due by February 26, 2015.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Handling Branch (AFRL/RIEB) is soliciting white papers under this Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for research, development, integration, test and evaluation of technologies/techniques to advance current intelligence and situation awareness applications specifically focused on mission reporting and analysis.

The focus of this BAA directly supports the AFRL/RIEB mission to research, develop, and demonstrate advanced information technology solutions to support timely and secure intelligence information access, analysis, and dissemination for National Defense and Intelligence Community decision makers at all echelons, which enables the continuous assessment of global conditions and events; establishes and maintains critical battlespace situational awareness (including an understanding of adversarial capabilities and intent); provides game-changing intelligence; and locates, identifies, and tracks red, blue, and gray forces anywhere, anytime in near real-time.

The purpose of these capabilities is to provide the right information to the right person at the right time. This enables a decision system that creates and exploits knowledge across the full range of military operations in real-time and faster than any adversary can react. These capabilities must provide a framework to better understand the state and non-state actor intent, capabilities, and enable desired effects across permissive, contested, and highly-contested operating environments (anti-access area denial (A2AD)). Further, these capabilities must be seamlessly integrated across operational domains to maximize joint force battlespace awareness, quickly authenticate and fuse data, and rapidly disseminate the information with joint services, other United States Government agencies, and allies.

FOCUS AREA:  Information Reporting

This BAA seeks out applications for mission reporting to include processing, exploitation, data analytics, data visualization, and dissemination of the reporting. Processing and exploitation converts the collected information into forms suitable to the production of intelligence. The collected raw data is transformed into information that can be readily analyzed and disseminated. The reports that are developed by these applications must be consumable by intelligence applications for the analysis of temporal, spatial, entity and association information. These capabilities would provide access to multiple data sources, data mining, and organizational collaboration tools that facilitate trend, link, pattern, and distributed analysis to support activity prediction and customer unique capabilities.

Reporting applications should be focused on multi-INT, multi-source data to include, but not limited to, human intelligence, open source intelligence, signals intelligence, and geospatial intelligence. In order to contend with the continuous barrage of data, processing, exploitation, and analysis must be able to scale to large quantities of both streaming and batch data. Decision makers in various domains are constantly hampered by information overload from numerous diverse sources. This places tremendous strain and burden on the decision maker to manually process incoming information.

In order to leverage multi-source competencies AFRL is seeking the next innovative reporting applications that will support combat mission data management and quantitative ISR mission assessment. Specifically, these applications will provide automated web-based data collection that can be made available to multiple applications, full report generation, workflow, search/query, visualization, analytics, and alerting for the user community. These applications shall provide web-based, centralized and standardized reporting capabilities and it will make information readily available to commanders, decision makers, and operators. Performers must fully support the development of documentation for certification and accreditation activities, as applications will eventually be accessible on numerous networks to include unclassified Internet, NIPR, SIPR, JWICS, among others.

Proposed information reporting applications shall provide capabilities to address a multitude of report types, templates, report generation and workflow (Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD)), information requests, analysis, alerting, role-based access and privileges, security management (e.g. classification markings), be able to operate in classified domains and within cloud computing implementations. These applications must allow for internal and external data service interfaces.

Combat and ISR mission data are critical elements of mission assessment and sources of intelligence on adversary forces and tactics. Without the automation of gathering and handling this data, operators are forced to manually perform these tasks which prevents timely and effective analysis. The information reporting applications must address ISR and combat mission data and perform quantitative and qualitative mission assessment that can be disseminated and available for consumption.

 AWARD INFORMATION:

FUNDING: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $7.75M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY15 – $1.5M; FY16 – $2.25M; FY17 – $2.25M; and FY18 – $1.75M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 24 months with dollar amounts normally ranging from $100K to $700K per year. However, there is the potential to make awards up to any dollar value.

The Government is only soliciting white papers 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 regarding the proposal.

It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY15 should be submitted by 26 Feb 2015; FY16 by 30 Nov 2015; FY17 by 30 Nov 2016; FY18 by 30 Nov 2017. White papers will be accepted until 2 PM Eastern time on 28 Sep 2018, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. This BAA will close on 28 Sep 2018.

APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION:

CRITERIA: The following criteria, which are listed in 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) Overall Scientific and Technical Merit — The soundness of approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology, with proven, incremental, or novel techniques,

(2) Related Experience – The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge,
(3) Openness, Maturity and Assurance of Solution – The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology, and
(4) Reasonableness and realism of proposed costs and fees (if any).

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps