Mission Awareness for Mission Assurance (MAMA)

Type of document: Contract Notice
Country: United States

Mission Awareness for Mission Assurance (MAMA)

Agency:
Department of the Air Force

Official Address:
26 Electronic Parkway Rome NY 13441-4514

Zip Code:
13441-4514

Contact:
Gail E. Marsh, Contracting Officer, Phone 315-330-7518, Email Gail.Marsh@us.af.mil

Link:

Date Posted:
11/09/2017

Classification:
A

Contract Description:
AMENDMENT 7 to BAA RIK-2014-0014

The purpose of this modification is to republish the original announcement, incorporating any previous amendments, pursuant to FAR 35.016(c).

This republishing also includes the following changes:

(a) Section III: Updated to reflect current access requirements;
(b) Section IV.2: Updated content instructions;
(c) Section IV.3.a: Revised to reflect current NISPOM change;
(d) Section IV.4.b & c: Updated date of cited clauses
(e) Section VI.1: Updated proposal guidance
(f) Section VI.5: Updated to reflect current information; and
(g) Section VII: Revised/Updated Ombudsman.

No other changes have been made.
_________________________________________

NAICS CODE: 541712

FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL – Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514

BROAD AGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT (BAA) TITLE: Mission Awareness for Mission Assurance (MAMA)

BAA ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement

BAA NUMBER: BAA RIK-2014-0014

CATALOG OF FEDERAL DOMESTIC ASSISTANCE (CFDA) Number: 12.800

I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION:

The Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI), Rome Research Site, is soliciting white papers under this announcement for innovative technologies to enable effective cyber situational awareness (SA) during mission execution to achieve mission assurance for military operations.

AFRL/RI conducts research in the areas of information management and dissemination as well as cyber science and technology. This research has led to the development of service oriented information management and dissemination implementations, in particular, Phoenix Prime. The continued development and maturation of innovative concepts and enhanced services that maximize the situational awareness during mission execution to achieve mission assurance of military operations is the primary focus of this BAA.

Background: The Information Management Technologies Branch of the Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Rome Research Site, are researching and developing techniques and services for information management in diverse military environments. Information Management (IM) is defined as a set of intentional activities to maximize the value of information to support the objectives of the military enterprise. These activities include role/policy based information access control, information tagging and contextualization through semantic assessment, discovery and identification, scalability and responsiveness to resource availability and the administrative activities that support them. Understanding how concepts for sharing information amongst disparate producers, consumers and operational domains and the technologies that can be applied in the unique military operational and tactical domains are of critical importance.

AFRL’s information centric technology vision has culminated in a suite of AFRL Information Management (IM) services known as Phoenix Prime. Phoenix Prime is a service oriented information system that enables the management of all information interactions through domain independent “universal services” whose functions include obtaining, discovering, characterizing, identifying, prioritizing, mediating, persisting and disseminating information within and between mission partners. The most recent Phoenix Prime developments correlate users with operational activities, determine information requirements, assess information for mission relevance and establish information processing priorities based upon mission importance and system resource availability.

A new consolidated program called “Mission Awareness for Mission Assurance” (MAMA) is being started under this BAA. The goal of MAMA is to enhance cyber situational awareness by the automated assessment of mission execution through the analysis of network traffic flows. This resultant capability is an enabler to achieving mission assurance by allowing prioritization of mission essential functions, mapping of critical cyber assets, vulnerability assessment of mission essential functions and mitigation of vulnerabilities and risks.

A key component of the Cyber Vision 2025 tenet of “Assure and Empower the mission” is that ensuring survivability and freedom of action in contested and denied environments requires enhanced cyber situational awareness (SA) for air, space, and cyber commanders. This can be enabled by, in part, mission mapping. The vision goes on to identify then enabling science and technology (S&T) for mission assurance and empowerment as mission mapping to systems components, cyber mission verification across sensors/platforms and dynamic cyber mission configuration. This program acknowledges that cyber is inextricably entwined with the air and space missions, yet the Air Force has no “true” cyber SA, even for limited critical missions; therefore, the vision of this program is to expand upon the Cyber Vision 2025 S&T platform to not only cyber missions, but to all Air Force missions.
Much like the recommendations made by Cyber Vision 2025, the Scientific Advisory Board Study on Cyber Situational Awareness also advocates S&T investment in automated mission mapping, data tagging, utilization of context-aware routers and the evaluation of these technologies in an operationally relevant environment. The study sees this investment crucial to addressing the fact that, even for critical missions, there is almost no understanding of Air Force mission dependencies on information systems.
The global AF enterprise relies heavily on communication networks to achieve its mission of global vigilance, global reach and global power. However, as the AF and the nation are gaining unprecedented capabilities from high capacity global networks, it is also contending with increasingly sophisticated threats to its networks and systems. These threats range from distributed denial of service, to Anti-satellite (ASAT), to insider threats. While there are significant investments seeking to mitigate these threats, none will eliminate them. AFRL/RI recognizes that the first step to mission assurance, despite the presence of these threats, is improved SA for decision makers at all levels. This program seeks to provide mission awareness through extraction and analysis of content transiting the Air Force Network (AFNET), to inform Command and Control (C2) elements monitoring mission execution, and to control critical network elements to improve mission effectiveness.

MAMA’s challenge is to first identify what specific missions are supported by what specific information flows. This is called “mapping information to missions.” However, simply counting packets between endpoints may provide a measure of network performance, but it does not indicate much about mission performance. The Air Force must separate the SA needed to support cyber-dependent mission assurance from awareness of network health and status. Reports to commanders must be at the mission-impact level, not at the network level. The key is to operate higher in the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack by tagging information objects with mission relevant data. MAMA will extract semantic content from mission relevant metadata of transiting information objects to assess mission status. In addition to supporting a MAMA’s goal of addressing current missions, it is anticipated that the massive amount of extracted semantic content will be useful for other goals such as identification of “low and slow” cyber threats, a big data problem that falls outside the scope of MAMA, but within the scope of AFRL/RI.
AFRL/RI is uniquely suited to develop the MAMA concept because it draws heavily upon a maturing, moderate Technology Readiness Level (TRL), set of prior investments to accomplish its objectives. Among these is the Content and Context-aware Trust Router (CCTR) as the high capacity broker that is capable of extracting and brokering information around the AFNET. The broker will forward selected traffic to Phoenix Prime, a cloud-scale enterprise-class information management system that will extract semantic content into a triple store accessible to backend analytics engines. The triple stores will challenge AFRL/RI’s high performance computing expertise to maintain performance over time in an effort to continuously assess mission status. Perhaps most importantly, it will marry up AFRL/RISA’s adaptive mission templates with a specific mission domain to semantically model the mission space, extract mission orders, and support mission awareness.

The Department of Defense (DoD) and AF are operating within a contested cyber environment and its ability to accomplish their mission will require responding to network dynamics. In addition, peer competitors may deny us continuous communications with mission assets, leading to uncertainty for commanders. MAMA, while not directly assuring the mission, supports mission assurance by providing a network elements basis for resource allocation, and monitors information flows to infer mission performance on a large scale.

AFRL/RIS proposes to focus this program on the Space domain for several reasons. First, as a less mature domain, it is more receptive to technology insertion than the Air domain that has more mature processes and is in the midst of major acquisition efforts.

The high level challenge of providing mission awareness for mission assurance can be broken down into several sub-challenges that are addressed within the program structure. This BAA comprises three projects with each having its own technical risks that require substantial S&T: 1) Mapping the Mission to Information Flows 2) Mission Information Sufficiency, Correlation, and Event Learning (MISCEL) and 3) Integration, Demonstration and Validation of MAMA.

At a high level, MAMA brings together three types of data: 1) models of information flows that support known mission types, 2) knowledge of specific missions being executed with principals mapped to corresponding roles, and 3) the information transiting the network either in support of these missions or from other unmapped data flows. Based upon these components, MAMA will provide mission awareness to C2 operators and provide feedback to Quality of Service mechanisms in the CCTR.

FY17/18 Focus Area: Red Teaming, Validation, and Demonstration

The key focus area for this phase of the BAA is quality, performance, scalability, and evaluation of Mission Awareness for Mission Assurance (MAMA) program technologies (Content-Aware Context-Aware Trusted Router, Ontologies, Semantic Metatagger, Adaptive Mission Templates (AMT), OSCAR, and STAMPEDE Mission Services) through red teaming, validation, and experimentation, with secondary objectives for extending technology functionality and domain applicability. Activities within this phase should drive an increase in technology quality, standards-based representations and pluggability, cyber and security resiliency, reusability, and ease of use. Additionally, it should result in gauging how well the Semantic Templates for Assured Missions in a Proxy-Enabled Dissemination Environment (STAMPEDE) technologies fulfill their intended purposes and contribute, in practice, to solving challenges involving multiple organizations and domains, big-data mission environments, mission and cyber situational awareness (SA) needs, and mission assurance decision support.

Validation: Multiple forms of objective validation should be applied at the distinct tiers of the technology development “V” in order to assess and improve quality, functionality, security, and performance. Baselines for quality can be established, and subsequently improved, through objective testing, experimentation, code analysis, ontology review, and rigorous quality control metrics generated from deployment and event log analysis, platform monitoring, and 3-V (Velocity, Variety, Volume) Information Management (IM) analysis. Functional validation can also be justified through experimentation and peer-reviewed publications that evaluate, describe, and provide conclusive evidence of holistic system mission awareness and assurance capabilities. Peer review in high quality research conferences, journals, or DoD conferences/summits provide a means of gauging the criticality, novelty, and S&T substance of core STAMPEDE technologies, as well as providing objective feedback and guidance from highly relevant and technologically aligned subject matter experts (SMEs).

Red Teaming: Red teaming should be used to ensure that MAMA technologies are well designed and robust to cyber threats. Performing objective testing and red teaming matures technology and exposes flaws. At a minimum, this activity requires fully mapping out and evaluating architectural, functional, and exploitation resiliency requirements. At maximum, activities should include performing functional, intrusion, and penetration testing to determine technology weaknesses, flaws, and vulnerabilities for mitigation. These resulting recommendations should be generated early in any proposed schedule, in order to have strategies and plans in place for mitigation.

Experimentation: The goal of this project is to develop a fully validated and functionally assessed architecture, components, services, and technology installation for enhanced mission awareness and assurance. Exercising a limited technology experiment within an operational context is a target milestone that would drive more enhanced systems integration, qualitatively assess performance and functional capabilities, and demonstrate mission-critical technologies for how well they provision, support, represent, and inform mission assurance. The semantic services of STAMPEDE support these approaches but must balance their innovative use cases for relationships extracted from either published information or knowledge within data lakes, archives, or database siloes, and in accordance with mission and service requirements. Experimentation targets to evaluate and improve compliance with functional and validation metrics include:

– Bi-directional Cyber Situational Awareness SA – Support cyber posture and ISR tools by making operational dependencies and mission prioritization data available through standards-based web services and runtime analytics within STAMPEDE’s architecture.
– Holistic Mission Support – Demonstrating STAMPEDE support for multi-domain information formats (Air, Space, Cyber, US TRANSCOM) are integrated into the fabric of semantic mission awareness that is represented and persisted in STAMPEDE.
– Commander and Mission-driven Assurance Decision Support – Demonstrate STAMPEDE information-level support for SA integration of multi-domain (Air, Space, Cyber, US TRANSCOM) mission effectiveness analytics, commander’s critical information requirements, and mission information flows.
– Cyber Integrated Multi-Domain SA and Vulnerability Analysis – Demonstrate STAMPEDE information-level support of network health/status (e.g. Cauldron Scoring, Cyber SA, etc.), cyber threat awareness (STIX, Snort, NMap, etc.), and mission-mapped cyber dependencies.
– Multi-Domain Mission Representation and Analysis – Demonstrate multi-domain (Air, Space, Cyber, US TRANSCOM) mission representations within AMT, with support for inter-dependent mission essential functions (MEF) discovery that span across kinetic ops, information, authority, and cyber flows.
– Performance and Scalability – Establish key performance parameters based upon operationally relevant criteria for applied use cases, and seek to enhance STAMPEDE performance and scalability to those operationally required levels.

STAMPEDE Technology Maturity and Domain Applications: This program phase will mature the current semantic mission awareness technologies of STAMPEDE through functional development, with advanced applied research and development intended to extend STAMPEDE to more operational domains, validate a greater breadth of multi-domain mission awareness use cases, and increase the holistic maturity and functional robustness of STAMPEDE’s technologies. Options for targeted functional development and framework maturity include:

– Demonstrate the full-spectrum of mission awareness semantic ontologies and technologies that span the cyber, information, domain, and mission relationships.
– Design, develop, and prototype an enhanced data lake for integration with STAMPEDE for operationally relevant big-data experiments, with pluggable interfaces for multi-data lake implementations, tagging re-queried information for analysis via the STAMPEDE monitoring capability and visualization.
– Develop a data lake monitoring service that examines workflows, retrieves information tags, and executes queries against a data lake’s metadata, resulting in documents, messages, & files that are fed into STAMPEDE for tagging, alignment, mapping and brokering/routing.
– Quality of Service (QoS) improvements for CCTR and STAMPEDE use cases involving messaging metrics and priority based MIO policy management/routing.
– Development of CCTR encrypted communication capabilities for SSL/TLS adherence, and other modern standards and improvements to message delivery reporting capability.
– Develop interfaces between STAMPEDE and CSA Explorer for live integration and visualization through monitoring, filtering, and mission assurance decision-making.
– Transform Mission Assurance from Situational Awareness (MASA) MASA data into the CSA Explorer data model while identifying and utilizing geo-location, mission mappings, operating systems, attack graphs, and cyber threats for use in operator visualizations.
– Develop the necessary APIs and interfaces to enable STAMPEDE semantic services to interface with Phoenix Prime, and leverage combinational STAMPEDE/Phoenix Prime semantic brokering for mission awareness and assessing the benefits gained through a shared mix of capabilities, components and ontologies.
– Enables administrators to efficiently monitor all aspects of system and service states, manage active missions and information requirements, define and modify service configurations, and define and deconflict domain, organization, environment specific information, and tagging processes.

In summary, the primary goal of this phase is to develop a fully validated and functionally assessed architecture, components, services, and technology installation for enhanced mission awareness and assurance. In order for STAMPEDE technologies to be transitioned they must be relatively easy to deploy, configure, administer and monitor. Ease of deployment will also require the porting of STAMPEDE technologies to appropriate domain and technology environments. Achieving the objectives of this development phase will result in subjecting program technologies to architectural and functional validation, objective architectural, functional, and exploitative red teaming, and in-depth, qualitative, multi-domain scenario experimentation that exercises the full-range of mission support, awareness, interoperability, and assurance capabilities.

Offerors are encouraged to provide an on-site contractor presence working at AFRL/RISA Rome, NY to foster collaboration with other in-house teams, to minimize integration risks and to effectively leverage experimentation/demonstration resources.

Phoenix Prime software and documentation are available upon request to Timothy Blocher (timothy.blocher@us.af.mil).

STAMPEDE software and documentation are available upon request to Jason Bryant (Jason.Bryant.8@us.af.mil).

Security Classification: Software development will largely be UNCLASSIFIED but the domain specific activities may be up to Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI).

II. AWARD INFORMATION:

1. FUNDING: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $24.9M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows:

FY15 – $1.4M
FY16 – $5.2M
FY17 – $4.6M
FY18 – $7.7M
FY19 – $6.0M

Individual awards will not normally exceed 24 months with dollar amounts normally ranging from $250K to $1.5M. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value.

The Government reserves the right to select all, part, or none of the proposals received, subject to the availability of funds. All potential Offerors should be aware that due to unanticipated budget fluctuations, funding in any or all areas may change with little or no notice.

2. FORM. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts.

3. BAA TYPE: This is a two-step open broad agency announcement. This announcement constitutes the only solicitation.

As STEP ONE – The Government is only soliciting white papers at this time. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL. 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.

III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION:

All qualified offerors who meet the requirements of this BAA may apply.

Foreign or foreign-owned offerors are advised that their participation is subject to foreign disclosure review procedures. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors should immediately contact the contracting office focal point, Gail E. Marsh, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-7518 or e-mail Gail.Marsh@us.af.mil for information if they contemplate responding. The e-mail must reference the BAA number and title.

Contractor employees requiring access to USAF bases, AFRL facilities, and/or access to U.S. Government Information Technology (IT) networks in connection with the work on contracts, assistance instruments or other transactions awarded under this BAA must be U.S. citizens. For the purpose of base and network access, possession of a permanent resident card (“Green Card”) does not equate to U.S. citizenship. This requirement does not apply to foreign nationals approved by the U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. State Department under international personnel exchange agreements with foreign governments. Any waivers to this requirement must be granted in writing by the Contracting Officer prior to providing access. The above requirements are in addition to any other contract requirements related to obtaining a Common Access Card (CAC). If an IT network/system does not require AFRL to endorse a contractor’s application to said network/system in order to gain access, the organization operating the IT network/system is responsible for controlling access to its system. If an IT network/system requires a U.S. Government sponsor to endorse the application in order for access to the IT network/system, AFRL will only endorse the following types of applications, consistent with the requirements above:

1. Contractor employees who are U.S. citizens performing work under contracts, assistance instruments or other transactions awarded under this BAA.
2. Contractor employees who are non-U.S. citizens and who have been granted a waiver.

Any additional access restrictions established by the IT network/system owner apply.

IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the Technical point of contact (POC) listed in SECTION VII. DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer.

1. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by 3 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) on the following dates to maximize the possibility of award:

FY15 by 01 Nov 2014
FY16 by 01 Sep 2015
FY17 by 10 Oct 2016
FY18 by 01 Sep 2017
FY19 by 01 Sep 2018

White papers will be accepted until 3 PM Eastern Time on 30 Sep 2019, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. This BAA will close on 30 Sep 2019.

All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after submission.

2. CONTENT AND FORMAT: Offerors are required to submit 2 copies of a 5-6 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. 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.

The white paper will be formatted as follows:

a. Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count);
b. Section B: Task Objective; and
c. Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables.

All white papers shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 point. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) Code, their unique entity identifier and electronic funds transfer (EFT) indicator (if applicable), an e-mail address and reference BAA RIK-2014-0014 with their submission.

Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b).

3. HANDLING AND MAILING INSTRUCTIONS:

a. CLASSIFICATION GUIDANCE. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 and incorporating Change 2 dated May 18, 2016, as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: .

In the event of a possible or actual compromise of classified information in the submission of your white paper or proposal, immediately but no later than 24 hours, bring this to the attention of your cognizant security authority and AFRL Rome Research Site Information Protection Office (IPO):

Vincent Guza
315-330-4048 0730-1630 Monday-Friday
315-330-2961 Evenings and Weekends
Email: vincent.guza@us.af.mil

b. CLASSIFIED SUBMISSIONS. AFRL/RISA will accept classified responses to this BAA when the classification is mandated by classification guidance provided by an Original Classification Authority of the U.S. Government, or when the offeror believes the work, if successful, would merit classification. Security classification guidance in the form of a DD Form 254 (DoD Contract Security Classification Specification) will not be provided at this time since AFRL is soliciting ideas only. Offerors that intend to include classified information or data in their white paper submission or who are unsure about the appropriate classification of their white papers should contact the technical point of contact listed in Section VII for guidance and direction in advance of preparation.

c. MAILING INSTRUCTIONS. All classified responses to this announcement must be sent U.S. Postal Service, registered mail and addressed to AFRL/RISA, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505, and reference BAA RIK-2014-0014. Electronic submission of classified white paper information is NOT authorized.

Electronic submission of unclassified white papers to Albert Frantz (Albert.Frantz@us.af.mil) will be accepted. Encrypt or password-protect all proprietary information prior to sending. Offerors are responsible to confirm receipt with the technical POC listed in Section VII. AFRL is not responsible for undelivered documents.

Any questions can be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact listed in Section VII.

4. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS/CONSIDERATIONS:

a. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement.

b. SYSTEM FOR AWARD MANAGEMENT (SAM). Offerors must be registered in the SAM database to receive a contract award, and remain registered during performance and through final payment of any contract or agreement. Processing time for registration in SAM, which normally takes forty-eight hours, should be taken into consideration when registering. Offerors who are not already registered should consider applying for registration before submitting a proposal. The provision at FAR 52.204-7, System for Award Management (Oct 2016) applies.

c. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION AND FIRST-TIER SUBCONTRACT/ SUBRECIPIENT AWARDS: Any contract award resulting from this announcement may contain the clause at FAR 52.204-10 – Reporting Executive Compensation and First-Tier Subcontract Awards (Oct 2016).

d. ALLOWABLE CHARGES: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered 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 specified in FAR 31.205-18.

e. GOVERNMENT APPROVED ACCOUNTING SYSTEM: An offeror must have a government approved accounting system prior to award of a cost-reimbursement contract per limitations set forth in FAR 16.301-3(a) to ensure the system is adequate for determining costs applicable to the contract. The acceptability of an accounting system is determined based upon an audit performed by the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA).

V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION:

1. 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:

a. Overall Scientific and Technical Merit — The soundness of approach for the development and/or enhancement of the proposed technology,
b. Related Experience – The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge.
c. 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
d. Reasonableness and realism of proposed costs and fees (if any).

No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received.

2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS:

Only Government employees will evaluate the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as “handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, and comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks.” These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection.

3. ADEQUATE PRICE COMPETITION: The Government may simultaneously evaluate proposals received under this BAA with a common cutoff date for multiple offerors. In this case, the Government may make award based on adequate price competition, and offerors must be aware that there is a possibility of non-selection due to a proposal of similar but higher-priced technical approach as compared to another offeror.

4. FEDERAL AWARDEE PERFORMANCE AND INTEGRITY INFORMATION SYSTEM (FAPIIS)
PUBLIC ACCESS: The Government is required to review and consider any information about the applicant that is in the FAPIIS before making any award in excess of the simplified acquisition threshold (currently $150,000) over the period of performance. An applicant may review and comment on any information about itself that a federal awarding agency previously entered. The Government will consider any comments by the applicant, in addition to other information in FAPIIS in making a judgment about the applicant’s integrity, business ethics, and record of performance under federal awards when completing the review of risk posed by applicants as described in 2 CFR § 200.205 Federal Awarding Agency Review of Risk Posed by Applicants and per FAR 9.104-6 FAPIIS.

VI. STEP TWO INFORMATION – REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL & AWARD:

1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government.

For additional information when developing proposals, reference the AFRL “Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): Guide for Industry,” Mar 2015, and RI-Specific Proposal Preparation Instructions, Jan 2017.

2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS:

Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a top secret facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to top secret information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA.

This acquisition may involve data that is subject to export control laws and regulations. Only contractors who are registered and certified with the Defense Logistics Information Service (DLIS) at and have a legitimate business purpose may participate in this solicitation. For questions, contact DLIS on-line at or at the DLA Logistics Information Service, 74 Washington Avenue North, Battle Creek, Michigan 49037-3084, and telephone number 1-800-352-3572. You must submit a copy of your approved DD Form 2345, Militarily Critical Technical Data Agreement, with your white paper/proposal.

3. DATA RIGHTS:

a. SBIR RIGHTS. The potential for inclusion of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or data rights other than unlimited on awards is recognized. In accordance with (IAW) the Small Business Administration (SBA) SBIR Policy Directive, Section 8(b), SBIR data rights clauses are non-negotiable and must not be the subject of negotiations pertaining to an award, or diminished or removed during award administration. Issuance of an award will not be made conditional based on forfeit of data rights. If the SBIR awardee wishes to transfer its SBIR data rights to the Air Force or to a third party, it must do so in writing under a separate agreement. A decision by the awardee to relinquish, transfer, or modify in any way its SBIR data rights must be made without pressure or coercion by the agency or any other party.
b. NON-SBIR RIGHTS. Non-SBIR data rights are strongly encouraged to be unlimited, but will be evaluated and negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Government Purpose Rights are anticipated for data developed with DoD-reimbursed Independent Research and Development (IR&D) funding.

4. REPORTING:
a. Contract Applicable: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offerors will be given complete instructions on the submission process for the reports.
b. FAPISS Applicable: As required by 2 CFR 200 Appendix XII of the Uniform Guidance and FAR 9.104-6, non-federal entities (NFEs) are required to disclose in FAPIIS any information about criminal, civil, and administrative proceedings, and/or affirm that there is no new information to provide. This applies to NFEs that receive federal awards (currently active grants, cooperative agreements, and procurement contracts) greater than $10,000,000 for any period of time during the period of performance of an award/project.

5. NOTICE: The following provisions* apply:
(a) FAR 52.209-11, Representation by Corporations Regarding Delinquent Tax Liability or a Felony Conviction under any Federal Law
(b) DFARS 252.204-7008, Compliance with Safeguarding Covered Defense Information Controls
(c) DFARS 252.239-7017, Notice of Supply Chain Risk
* Please note that the current versions or deviations of the related clauses will be included in any resulting contract.

6. GRANT AWARDS ONLY: For efforts proposed as grant awards, offerors must provide an abstract in their proposal (not to exceed one page) that is publicly releasable and that describes – in terms the public may understand – the project or program supported by the grant. The DoD will publicly post the abstract to comply with Section 8123 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2015 (Pub. L. 113-235).

VII. AGENCY CONTACTS:

All white paper and proposal submissions and any questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact as specified below (unless otherwise specified in the technical area):

Jason Bryant
AFRL/RISA
525 Brooks Road
Rome New York 13441-4505
Telephone: (315) 330-7670
Email: Jason.Bryant.8@us.af.mil

Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below (email requests are preferred):

Gail Marsh
Telephone (315) 330-7518
Email: gail.marsh@us.af.mil

Emails must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition.

In accordance with AFFARS 5301.91, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (Jun 2016) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman and AFRL Alternate Ombudsman are as follows:

Ombudsman: Ms Lisette K. LeDuc,
1864 Fourth St.
Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130
937-904-4407
lisette.leduc@us.af.mil

Alternate Ombudsman: Ms Kimberly L. Yoder
1864 Fourth St.
Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130
937-255-4967
kimberly.yoder@us.af.mil

All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.

Sol Number:
BAA-RIK-2014-0014