Advanced Software Engineering Technologies for the Software Producibility Initiative

The purpose of this modification is to republish the original announcement, incorporating all previous modifications, pursuant to FAR 35.016(c). This republishing also includes the following changes: (a) Section IV/Application and Submission Information: Under Paragraph 1 - Added new URL for the BAA Guide to Industry; (b) Section IV.5: Added latest change to NISPOM; (c) Section V, 1 & 3: Removed the second to the last sentence in Sub-Section 1 and added Sub-Section 3 to clarify the use of adequate price competition; (d) Section VI.5: Revised highlight some of the new or revised contractual provisions; (e) Section VI: Added Paragraph 6 regarding grant awards. 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 TITLE: Advanced Software Engineering Technologies for the Software Producibility Initiative ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial Announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA-RIK-12-06 CFDA Number: 12.800 I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: Background: On behalf of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OASD(R&E)), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is seeking white papers for Advanced Software Engineering TechnologieS (ASETS) as part of the Software Producibility Initiative (SWPI). SWPI is an ongoing program with the overall goal of improving the Department of Defense's (DoD's) ability to design, build, test, and sustain software-intensive systems that are large-scale, high complexity, highly reliable, and operate in relevant military environments, which meet mission critical requirements, safety critical requirements as well as exhibit predictable behavior. Within SWPI, the ASETS BAA focuses on discovering and adapting cutting-edge ideas in computer science, mathematics, and information science to the production of military software. ASETS seeks to improve the producibility of software-intensive systems that directly support the Warfighter and operate in the most demanding military environments. Producibility may be defined as the capacity to design, produce, assure and evolve software-intensive systems in a predictable manner while effectively managing risk, cost, schedule, quality, and complexity [1]. Previous efforts have provided the foundation for future work by investigating specification of complex requirements; "correct-by-construction" software development; scalable composition; high-confidence software and middleware; system architectures for network-centric environments; technologies for system visualization, testing, verification, and validation; model-driven development approaches; data analytics; and digital curation & forensics. The ASETS BAA is weapons-system agnostic because software cross-cuts nearly all DoD weapons systems. The ASETS BAA is seeking innovative ideas to improve the DoD's ability to develop and sustain software systems; the ASETS BAA is not requesting effort to perform the sustainment. ASETS research concentrations are organized by software gap areas to focus investigations on software technology and to provide solutions that are broadly applicable to many systems. Capability Gap: The DoD strives for superiority in a complex operational environment composed of heterogeneous and ever-evolving pieces such as sensors and processing hardware, software, and wired and wireless communications infrastructure. To achieve superiority in this dynamic environment, the DoD invests in fully networked and maximally-capable sensors and platforms at the cutting edge of performance. Software has emerged as a key enabler of capability and flexibility in DoD systems. Software is essential to providing a vast range of military capabilities by playing a fundamental role [1] that deepens, broadens, links, and integrates diverse system elements. A pervasive DoD challenge is the production of software that provides the Warfighter superior and affordable military capability in an environment where hardware and sensor technology is rapidly advancing and systems' performance demands are ever-increasing. The Government Accountability Office has identified the increasing scope of software development as a contributing factor to poor acquisition program outcome [2]. OASD(R&E) has identified the need for advanced software engineering technology to enhance the producibility of software in this environment with the goal of speeding the delivery of affordable capability to the Warfighter and sustaining it. Specific needs are discussed in the description of Research Concentrations Areas below. Objective: White papers are being solicited for innovative approaches within the concentration areas listed below. Of interest are advanced software engineering technologies that harness cutting-edge ideas in computer science, mathematics, and information science to enable production of large-scale software-intensive systems with improved quality and performance, decreases in cost and development times, automation of labor-intensive and error-prone processes, increased reliability, and easier integration and sustainment. Proposed ideas should be candidates for advanced technology development and have an established theoretical basis. Techniques solely involving management and business processes are specifically excluded, as are efforts to sustain software systems Research Concentration Areas: White papers are welcomed in the four technical areas listed below. Cross-cutting proposals are also welcome, but should be identified as such. Proposals should focus generally on technology that enables the production of broad classes of software and not solve implementation-specific problems. Technical Area 1: Distributed Processing / Multi-core Processing: Investigate approaches that address the production of systems that use parallel or distributed processing. The DoD lacks the ability to quickly, accurately, and affordably optimize software in heterogeneous, multi-core environments that are dynamic and continually evolving. Future growth in computing performance will have to come from software parallelism that can exploit hardware parallelism [3]. The need for robust, general, and scalable parallel software approaches presents challenges that affect the entire DoD computing ecosystem. These systems range from large, distributed processing enterprises (including clouds) to self-contained embedded platforms such as aircraft where deterministic behavior and real-time control are essential. The environments include heterogeneous processing, and diverse communications channels with characteristics (e.g., latency and packet-loss) that vary over six-orders of magnitude. The National Academy of Sciences report entitled "The Future of Computing Performance" [3] identifies five main challenges to increasing performance and energy efficiency through parallelism: 1. Finding independent operations. 2. Communicating between operations. 3. Preserving locality between operations. 4. Synchronizing operations. 5. Balancing the load represented by the operations among the system resources. Promising research areas include, but are not limited to: partitioning approaches that address data dependencies, data locations, algorithmic dependencies, computational dependencies, and read and write dependencies; rethinking programming models so that programmers can express application parallelism; managing asynchronous behaviors; methods for resource allocation, load balancing, data communication, and synchronization of interactions; new programming languages with appropriate compilation and runtime support; graphical design approaches; executable design specifications; transactional memory approaches; and shared memory management approaches. Technical Area 2: Completeness, Development, Testing, and Sustainment: Investigate approaches that address the ability to design, produce, and assure large and complex software systems. In very large and complex systems, the DoD lacks the ability to quickly, accurately, and affordably check for the completeness of software with respect to design, the correctness of the software with respect to domain models, the traceability of software features to requirements, and the validation of system function against rigorous sets of performance and reliability standards. A large DoD system can have in excess of 100 million lines of code, 100s to 1,000s of configuration items, and diverse implementations (programming languages, operating systems, middleware, etc.). These systems may be built by different and geographically distributed developers and require nearly continuous modification and upgrades. It is not unusual to have simultaneous, conflicting requirements (performance, real-time processing, bounded failure recovery, security, etc.) in systems that are not identified until late stages of testing or integration. Further, unanticipated errors and conditions may arise from imprecise estimations during design, possible-but-unlikely inputs or stimuli, changes in the physical environment, operator error, or novel usage. All these factors make it very difficult for the DoD to design, produce, and assure software. Promising research areas include, but are not limited to: formal specification; syntactic and semantic methods; improvements to code quality (including formal verification); scaling improvements for formal methods; representations and quantification of uncertainty and risk; innovative theorem provers and satisfiability solvers; static and run-time analyzers; model checking approaches; innovative formal methods for architectures, refinement, and change traceability; characterizations of functional and non-functional properties; integration of specification or model-based methods with measurement-based methods; improved fault-tolerance, robustness, adaptability; sampling and measurement; runtime verification; forecasting system behaviors; thresholds to alert users; control recommendations; fault isolation; runtime code replacement or modification; identification of faults induced by hardware, residual software defects, or external influences; and testing and evaluation techniques. Technical Area 3: Instrumentation and Monitoring: Investigate approaches that enable quantitative and data-driven decisions about the production of software. The DoD lacks the ability to quickly, accurately, and affordably develop quantitative and data-driven descriptions of software that provide programmers and project leaders in Government and industry the same understanding of large and complex software-intensive systems. This gap leads to diverging or speculative assessments of project progress and system performance. It also hampers the test and evaluation community in designing and making assessments of sub-system and system performance that can clearly distinguish software performance from hardware performance. Promising research areas include, but are not limited to: instrumentation and monitoring of software and firmware with minimal invasiveness; multi-scale and multi-modal approaches such as representations, abstractions, and composition of models and measurements; integration of specification-based methods and measurement-based methods; quantification and representation of uncertainty; dynamic identification of performance metrics; data analytics that improve the performance of integrated development environments; automated data-capture and analysis for software-engineering process improvement; and code visualization. Technical Area 4: Legacy Software: Investigate approaches that address evolution and interoperability of older software with newly produced or upgraded software. The DoD lacks the ability to quickly, accurately, and affordably integrate newly-developed code with older code and verify system performance. Further, the DoD lacks complete code archives for its legacy systems. This thrust is distinct from the other technical areas because it pre-supposes that the developer will encounter software that was not designed to be easily upgraded or changed. Further, this thrust is not seeking approaches that improve the ability to sustain the software in a particular system. Approaches must investigate novel techniques that could be adopted in the future to sustain many different systems. The sustainment phase of software is critical for DoD systems given the long life of these systems. Software sustainment can be characterized as either (1) the modification or correction of existing code or (2) development of new functions or performance improvements that provide increased capability to enhance weapon system relevance [4]. Further complicating the task is that systems must integrate or interoperate with older or "legacy" systems whose code may have been written in an obsolete language, in a different context, or with different assumptions. It is prohibitively expensive to rewrite these legacy applications and "wrapping" them has fundamental performance limits for the distributed environment. Promising research areas include, but are not limited to: methods for extracting the architectural information, sub-components, and flow and inheritance graphs from object code; reverse engineering; digital forensics; digital curation; identifying functional and nonfunctional requirements in legacy code; traceability link recovery; deriving interface requirements between legacy and new code; methods for conversion and refactoring legacy code into new structured programs; and alternate frameworks for the examining legacy code. References: [1] National Academies Press "Critical Code: Software Producibility for Defense" http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12979 [2] GAO-11-233SP, Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs, 2011. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-233SP [3] National Academies Press "The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?" http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12980 [4] National Academies Press "Examination of the U.S. Air Force's Aircraft Sustainment Needs in the Future and Its Strategy to Meet Those Needs" http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13177 II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $7.8M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 12 - $1.5M; FY 13 - $1.6M; FY 14 - $1.6M; FY 15 - $1.6M; and FY16 - $1.5M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 24 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $100,000 to $500,000 per year. There is also the potential to make awards above or below this range. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements depending upon the nature of the work proposed. 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. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: Limited foreign allied participation is authorized at the prime contractor level. Foreign allied participation is allowed of the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and United Kingdom. Foreign Ownership, Control or Influence (FOCI) companies who have mitigated FOCI may inquire as to eligibility by contacting the contracting office focal point, Gail E. Marsh, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-7518 or e-mail Gail.Marsh@us.af.mil for verification prior to submitting a white paper. Please reference BAA-RIK-12-06. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. 3. 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. 4. Executive Compensation and First-Tier Sub-contract/Sub-recipient 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. Any grant or agreement award resulting from this announcement may contain the award term set forth in 2 CFR, Appendix A to Part 25 http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&sid=c55a4687d6faa13b137a26d0eb436edb&rgn=div5&view= text&node=2:1.1.1.41&idno=2#2:1.1.1.4.1.2.1.1 5. 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). IMPORTANT: If you do not have a DCAA approved accounting system access the following link for instructions: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=1cffad228f48b58057072a6c9113799d&tab= core&_cview=1 IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL 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. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): Guide for Industry," Mar 2015, and Proposal Preparation Instructions, Dec 2014 may be accessed at: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=1cffad228f48b58057072a6c9113799d&tab= core&_cview=1 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit an electronic copy of a 4 to 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: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone, fax and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count); Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables. 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). All white papers shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and reference BAA-RIK-12-06 with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph six of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 12 should be submitted by 30 Mar 2012; FY 13 by 5 Nov 2012; FY 14 by 4 Nov 2013; FY 15 by 3 Nov 2014 and; FY 16 by 2 Nov 2015. White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 30 September 2016, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. The closing date for this BAA is 2PM Eastern Time on 30 September 2016. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: 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. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 and incorporating Change 1 dated March 28, 2013, 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: http://www.dss.mil. 6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement, including whitepapers, must be submitted via email to: Steven.Drager@us.af.mil. 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 V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: White papers and/or proposals will be evaluated through a peer or scientific review process using the following criteria, listed in descending order of importance, 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 of the Proposed Approach - 1a) The extent to which the objective of the proposed approach provides improvements over already-existing approaches, if any, that are currently used to reach the same objective as the proposed approach. 1b) The extent to which the description of the proposed technical approach is distinct from other currently-researched or emerging approaches, if any, with the same objective. (2) The merit of measurement techniques for tracking progress on the proposed effort. (3) Return on Investment - The extent to which the offerors proposed approach provides a return on investment including metrics and measurement techniques to validate the claims. (4) Transition Likelihood - The merit of the offeror's proposed path to broad adoption of the proposed approach. (5) Related Experience - The extent to which the offeror demonstrates relevant technology and domain knowledge. (6) Openness/Maturity of Solution - The extent to which existing capabilities and standards are leveraged and the relative maturity of the proposed technology in terms of reliability and robustness. (7) 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. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 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 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. All offerors submitting white papers will only be contacted via email 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. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: 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 http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp/ and have a legitimate business purpose may participate in this solicitation. For questions, contact DLIS on-line at http://www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp or at the DLA Logistics Information Service, 74 Washington Avenue North, Battle Creek, Michigan 49037-3084, telephone number 1-800-352-3572. You must submit a copy of your approved DD Form 2345, Militarily Critical Technical Data Agreement, with your Proposal. 3. Data 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. Non-SBIR data rights less than unlimited 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: Once a proposal has been selected for award, the offeror will be given complete instructions on the submission process for submitting reports required during the life of the contract. 5. NOTICE: The following provisions apply: (a) DFARS 252.239-7017, Notice of Supply Chain Risk (Nov 2013) (b) DFARS 252.204-7009, Compliance with Safeguarding covered Defense Information Controls 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 publically post the abstract to comply with Section 8123 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2015 (Pub. L. 113-235). VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: TPOC: Steven Drager Telephone: (315) 330-2735 Email: Steven.Drager@us.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below (emails are preferred): Email: Gail E. Marsh Telephone (315) 330-7518 Email: gail.marsh@us.af.mil The email 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 (Apr 2014) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Ms. Barbara Gehrs AFRL/PK 1864 4th Street Building 15, Room 225 Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937) 255-5036; Comm: (937) 904-4407 Email: barbara.gehrs@us.af.mil All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.