NASA/Langley Research Center, Mail Stop 144, Industry Assistance Office, Hampton, VA 23681-0001

A -- FLIGHT CRITICAL SYSTEMS RESEARCH SOL 1-063-DIG.1299 DUE 093099 POC Deloris J. Hart, Contract Specialist, Phone (757)-864-2439, Fax (757) 864-7898, Email D.J.HART@larc.nasa.gov WEB: Click here for the latest information about this notice, http://nais.nasa.gov/EPS/LaRC/date.html#1-063-DIG.1299. E-MAIL: Deloris J. Hart, D.J.HART@larc.nasa.gov. NASA/LaRC plans to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP)1-063-DIG-1299 for Flight Critical Systems Research. The contract is for research and development to meet specific objectives in five critical areas in support of six NASA enabling technology goals. The goals are (1) to reduce the aircraft accident rate by a factor of five within 10 years, and factor of 10 within 20 years; (2) while maintaining safety, triple the aviation system throughput, in all weather conditions, within 10 years; to invigorate the general aviation industry, delivering 10000 aircraft annually within 10 years, and 20,000 aircraft annually in 20 years; (4) provide next-generation design tools and experimental aircraft to increase design confidence, and cut the development cycle time for aircraft in half; and (5)reduce the payload cost to low-Earth orbit by an order of magnitude from $10,000 to $1,000 per pound, within 10 years, and by an additional order of magnitude, from thousands to hundreds of dollars per pound within 25 years. The five research and development areas are as follows. 1. Guidance and Control in Adverse Conditions: Develop guidance and control technologies for operation throughout the flight envelope to (1) prevent loss of vehicle control and (2) recover vehicle control from loss-of-control (upset) conditions resulting from adverse flight conditions and vehicle/system failures which can each occur separately or in combinations. 2. Flight Critical Systems Design and Analysis: Develop and demonstrate methods, techniques, and tools for the design, verification, integration, validation, and certification of complex and highly integrated mission and life critical systems. Also, investigate methods for the combined and simultaneous assessment of dependability and performance that quantify the system's ability to perform to specification in the presence of faults; and develop databases from analytical, simulation, and flight investigations of flight critical systems performance in failure/damage situations. Such databases will provide the basis for new system designs and for new assessment techniques and tools. 3. Flight Critical Systems Health Management: Investigate the integration and validation of existing and future sensing/processing technologies to better aid in vehicle-wide health monitoring. Develop concepts, methods, and technologies for distributed, smart systems and onboard diagnostic system architectures. Validate new health monitoring and diagnostic system concepts in the context of catastrophic failure prevention and decreased maintenance costs. Proposed research may encompass malfunctions and failures of the aircraft propulsion system, airframe, and aircraft flight systems. 4. Situation Awareness: Develop technologies and methods that provide real-time information, electronically, to flight crews to improve their situation awareness. Types of real-time information include, but are not limited to, current position in four dimensional space, traffic locations and identity, terrain and obstacle locations, hazardous weather location and type, flight path or surface route information, air traffic control (ATC) instructions, and alerts of impending/potential hazardous situations. Also, develop technologies and methods aimed at increasing the situation awareness of air traffic controllers through, for example, systems to enable both strategic and tactical collaborative decision making, seamless surveillance, controller-pilot datalink communications (CPDLC), and alerting of path/route deviations by flight crews. 5. Systems Engineering and Analysis: Perform systems engineering in support of novel flight critical systems analysis and development from research concept through simulation and test to flight experiment. Specific functions associated with systems engineering include requirements analysis; complex system functional decomposition; experimental system specification; experimental system design; system verification and validation; cost-benefit studies; modeling and simulation; configuration management; systems integration; and systems assurance. The Contractor shall furnish the management, personnel, materials, equipment, and facilities necessary to perform specific task orders as as defined by the Government. An indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, cost plus incentive fee contract is contemplated with a 5-year period for issuance of task orders. The solicitation will contain the option to make multiple awards. Specific work requirements will be issued in "performance based" task orders with the Contractor performing and being evaluated against performance/standards metrics. This procurement will be conducted on a full and open competitive basis. The provisions and clauses in the RFP are those in effect through FAC 97-13. The Government does not intend to acquire a commercial item using FAR Part 12. See Note 26. The SIC Code and Size Standard are 8731 and 1500, respectively. The DPAS rating for this procurement is DO-A-1. The anticipated release date of RFP 1-063-DIG-1299 is on or about 08/23/99 with an anticipated proposal due date of on or about 9/30/99. All qualified responsible sources may submit a proposal which shall be considered by the agency. An ombudsman has been appointed. See Internet Note "B". The solicitation and any documents related to this procurement will be available over the Internet. These documents will be in Microsoft Office Suite (Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, or PowerPoint 4.0) format and will reside on a World-Wide Web (WWW) server, which may be accessed using a WWW browser application. The WWW address, or URL of the NASA/LaRC Business Opportunities page is http://procurement.nasa.gov/EPS/LaRC/class.html Prospective offerors shall notify this office of their intent to submit an offer. It is the offeror's responsibility to monitor the aforementioned Internet site for the release of the solicitation and amendments (if any). Potential offerors will be responsible for downloading their own copy of the solicitation and amendments (if any). Any referenced notes can be viewed at the following URL: http://cbdnet.access.gpo.gov/num-note.html and http://genesis.gsfc.nasa.gov/nasanote.html Posted 07/30/99 (D-SN361410). (0211)

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