AFMC, Air Force Research Laboratory/IFK, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY 13441-4514

A -- EVOLUTIONARY SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY INSERTION AND EVALUATION SOL PRDA 98-07-IFKPA POC Program Manager, Willis J. Horth, 315-330-3430; Joetta A. Bernhard, 315-330-2308, Contracting Officer; Technical Advisor, Frank S. LaMonica, 315-330-2055 The Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate (AFRL/IF) is soliciting proposals for new and creative research solutions pertaining to the development, insertion, evaluation, and transition of software technologies supporting evolutionary development of mission software. The intent of this Program Research and Development Announcement (PRDA) is to support Phase II of the Evolutionary Design of Complex Software (EDCS) Program. See the end of this announcement for background material on Phase I. The EDCS Phase II program involves the conduct of experiments to evaluate and demonstrate EDCS technologies in the solution of actual mission critical software problems (i.e., on actual system/subsystem developments and upgrades to major military systems). The intent is to assess the value of the EDCS developed technology on medium to large DoD system programs. In particular, it is envisioned that the following activities will be required by the contractor: (1). Integrate and scale/adapt selected EDCS technologies, as appropriate, for effective insertion into an associated DoD system development/upgrade. (2) Determine appropriate measures for determining the value of the technology. The measures should address usability, scalability, insertion cost, and impact on development/engineering productivity, product quality, and system life cycle cost. Determine availability of baseline data for comparison purposes. (3) Determine and establish appropriate mechanisms for collecting data necessary to measure results. (4) Apply the technologies and measure results. (5) Report on and demonstrate results. While potential military systems are identified below, other systems and application domains, (e.g. space-based military systems) are not precluded from participation. Program participants will be required to participate in a maximum of three (3) EDCS related meetings per year. The intent of the meetings is to provide program status/progress and collaborate with other participants and government personnel in such areas as evaluation measures, shared needs for technology improvement, lessons learned, insertion costs, evaluation results, etc. Active participation in technical discussions and technical reviews/presentations will be required. Proposals involving Air Force systems will have a higher priority of receiving Air Force funding than will proposals involving non-Air Force systems. That is, the Air Force component of EDCS Phase II funding will only be applied to contracts involving Air Force systems. Additional information on the EDCS Program, including its current participants and projects, may be obtained from its web site at http://www.ai.rl.af.mil/C3CB/edcs/index.html. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Offers are required to submit five (5) copies of a 15 page or less white paper with a cover letter. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title. Period of Performance, Cost of Task, Name of Company; Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary. Offerors must mark their white papers/proposals with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Willis J. Horth, Reference PRDA #98-07-IFKPA, AFRL/IFTD, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505. Small business offerors must also send one (1) copy of the cover letter only, by First Class mail to ATTN: Jan Norelli, Director of Small Business, AFRL/IFB, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome NY 13441-4514. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. 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. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of the PRDA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Complete instructions for proposal preparation will be forwarded with the invitation for proposal submission. Evaluation of proposals will be accomplished through a scientific review of each proposal using the following criteria, which are listed in descending order of relative importance, 1) Overall scientific and technical merit, including familiarity with the EDCS technologies, familiarity with the military system to which they will be applied, how the proposed technologies address the needs of the system, the expanse of EDCS technologies to be applied, and approaches to their application and evaluation, 2) Offeror's capability to successfully conduct the experiments (i.e., integration, adaptation, scale-up, insertion, evaluation, and demonstration of the technologies) with quantitative results, including the ability to synchronize and become an integral part of a planned military system/subsystem development/upgrade. Offerors should demonstrate adequacy of proposed measures, data collection mechanisms, and availability of baseline data for comparison purposes. Measures should address both technology benefits (i.e., improved productivity and product quality, reduced life cycle cost) and technology insertion costs, 3) Resource contributions on the part of contractors. Proposals should detail any co-funding or other resource contributions (e.g., manpower, technology, computing resources, supporting IR&D) and the reporting mechanisms to be used to verify such contributions, 4) Cost: The extent to which the proposal exhibits reasonableness and realism of cost and schedules. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting the proposals. The technical criteria will also be used to determine whether white papers submitted are consistent with the intent of the PRDA and of interest to the Government. Proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. Individual proposal evaluations will be based on acceptability or unacceptability without regard to other proposals submitted under this PRDA. Options are discouraged and unpriced options will not be considered for award. Principal funding of this PRDA and the anticipated award of contracts will start in FY98. Individual awards will not normally exceed 36 months in duration, with dollar amounts ranging between $250K to $5M. Total funding for the PRDA is $24M. Foreign-owned offerors are advised that their participation is excluded at the prime contract level. Data subject to export control constraints may be involved and only firms on the Certified Contractor Access List (CCAL) will be allowed access to such data. For further information on CCAL, contact the Defense Logistic Service Center at 1-800-352-3572. The cost of preparing proposals in response to this announcement is not 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 in FAR 31.205-18. The work to be performed may require a SECRET/NOFORN facility clearance and safeguarding capability, therefore personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to SECRET/NOFORN information at time of award. An Ombudsman has been appointed to hear significant concerns from offerors or potential offerors during the proposal development phase of this acquisition. Routine questions are not considered to be "significant concerns" and should be communicated directly to the Contracting Officer, Joetta Bernhard, 315-330-2308. The purpose of the Ombudsman is not to diminish the authority of the contracting officer or program manager, but to communicate contractor concerns, issues, disagreements, and recommendations to the appropriate Government personnel. The Ombudsman for this acquisition is Vincent R, Palmiero, Deputy Chief, Contracting Division, at 315-330-7746. When requested, the Ombudsman will maintain strict confidentially as to the source of the concern. The Ombudsman does not participate in the evaluation of proposals in the source selection process. An informational briefing is not planned. The cutoff date for submission white papers is 15 Mar 98 for FY98, and 15 Oct 98 for FY 99, 15 Oct 99 for FY00. This PRDA is open and effective until canceled. To receive a copy of the AFRL/IF "BAA & PRDA: A Guide for Industry", Sep 96(Rev), write to ATTN: Lucille Argenzia, AFRL/IFKR, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome NY 13441-4514, or the Guide may be accessed at the following Internet address: http://www.rl.af.mil/Lab/PK/bp-guide.html. All responsible firms may submit a white paper which shall be considered. Respondents are asked to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number with their submission as well as a fax number, and an e-mail address, and reference PRDA -98-07-IFKPA. Only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. EDS Phase 1 Background material: Evolutionary systems are those that are capable of accommodating change over an extended system lifetime with reduced risk and cost/schedule impact. Most complex military systems depend on software for their successful operation and, due to its relative flexibility verses computer hardware, the software in those systems is the primary vehicle for adapting to change. Changes in mission, changes to hardware/software and system configuration, changes to operational elements, and changes in volume/types of data processed require dynamic flexibility and adaptability. Current software technology lacks the ability to effectively support system change; whether that change be due to evolving system requirements in response to a new or modified threat, or due to the need to upgrade system application software to remove design or implementation defects, or due to computing platform (hardware/operating system) upgrades. System enhancements and upgrades are typically long and drawn out, require long lead-times for planning purposes, are very error prone, and are very expensive to perform. Several issues contributing to this situation include an inability to: understand inherent legacy systems or subsystems; effectively capture, manage, and take advantage of rationale for requirements, design, and implementation decisions; address maintenance issues during design and development; associate and drive the software implementation from its architectural representation; maintain a flexible implementation to the point of deployment; exploit high assurance techniques to meet a system's testing, verification, and validation needs; and effectively support collaboration and sharing of information between geographically distributed stakeholders including the user organization, acquisition agent, developer, support organization, etc. The cost and time to develop and evolve software in military systems must be reduced in order to make systems affordable over their life cycle and ultimately allow production of increasing numbers of copies of systems within budget and mission constraints. EDCS was conceived as a two-phased program. Phase I, which is primarily funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Technology Office (DARPA ITO) and AFRL/IF, involves over forty (40) technology development and integration efforts with industry and academia. The major technology areas being addressed during Phase I include: 1) Rationale Capture: A natural collaborative environment which supports the cost-effective capture and management of design rationale, complemented by representations which make it easy to retrieve, browse, and use the information during subsequent decision making activities. Capturing this information will allow changes to be accomplished faster and more effectively since personnel can quickly understand previous design and trade-off decisions. In addition, capturing knowledge of why a particular design was implemented over another can be used to insure that changes will not negatively affect the original design intent. 2) High Assurance: The synergistic integration of combinations of state-of-the-art testing and high assurance techniques that have been scaled-up to effectively support large systems. Effectively combining techniques will focus the testing activity to help both better design/select test cases and to detect software errors more quickly, reducing the previously time-consuming and labor intensive testing process. Techniques to support retesting only the portions of code affected by a modification will significantly reduce testing time required. 3) Architecture & Generation: Association of design and implementation information; specification, representation, evaluation, and communication of extensible software architectures; and formalization of reusable architectural patterns. These techniques will allow the evaluation of alternative architectures in the context of an expected operating environment to help select an optimal software architecture for that operational context and objective. The architectural representation can then be used to generate executable code and automatically generate test cases. Automation will increase productivity, reduce human error, and increase the resulting quality of the software. 4) Design Management: Standard interfaces, heterogeneous information base integration mechanisms, and web-based hyperlink management techniques to provide an effective distributed information management infrastructure within which software evolution can take place. This infrastructure will support effective project/process/product management, change management, transaction management, event monitoring, and configuration management within and across geographically distributed teams of design and development personnel. 5) Dynamic Environments: Advanced techniques in the areas of reengineering, rapid prototyping, and dynamic languages, to enable better user feedback during development, maintain design and implementation flexibility, and increase the reliability, efficiency, and maintainability of the resulting system. Dynamic language environments will enable flexible interleaving of the design, implementation, testing and tuning phases of software development (before and after deployment), as well as provide real-time garbage collection, portable standard libraries, techniques to enable the use of commercially available graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits, and interfaces to existing standards. Since the EDCS Program's inception in FY96, several major Air Force and DoD software intensive systems have been involved with the program, primarily through their contractors, to insure that the developed technology addresses current needs. These systems include the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS), B-2 Bomber, F-16, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Satellite Ground Systems, and USTRANSCOM Global Transportation Network (GTN). Personnel associated with these systems have surfaced several technological challenges which are being addressed by EDCS contractors, resulting in several major technology transition opportunities. Significant transition successes during Phase II will demonstrate the value of the EDCS Phase I Program as well as provide major systems programs with the technology necessary to more rapidly modify their software to meet new/modified mission requirements, extend system lifetime and utility, and reduce life cycle cost -- a win-win situation for everyone. (0041)

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