V3371041_Final_SSJ_Redacted.pdf

Procurement Request No. V3371041

V220T.12 (01/15)

DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY

VOLPE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS CENTER (VOLPE CENTER)

ADVANCED VEHICLE TECHNOLOGY DIVISION (V337)

SOLE SOURCE JUSTIFICATION

A. Description of Supplies/Services.

The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe Center) has supported the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in developing the Secure Data Commons (SDC) Platform (formerly the Connected Vehicle Pilot Evaluation Platform (CVPEP)). The platform is a cloud analytics platform that allows the storage and analysis of sensitive transportation data in a secure, restricted environment. The platform is being used for a variety of research efforts, but the Volpe team working on the SDC project developed the portion of the system that will be supporting the Connected Vehicle Pilot (CV Pilot) data storage and evaluation. The CV Pilot program is an FHWA sponsored program to determine the impacts of connected vehicle technologies, via three real-world deployments of CV Technology. The SDC is the tool that will be used to ingest, house, evaluate, and make determinations of the impacts of these deployments. Now that the SDC Platform has been built and has initial datasets, there is an immediate need to ingest and format additional CV Pilot datasets into the environment (due to an increased scope of the data being provided by the sites), and to restructure and prepare the additional data for analysis. The data from the CV Pilot program is currently being live-streamed to the SDC platform, and a loss in continuity will result in data loss from the program. To support this undertaking, the Volpe Center requires a contractor to provide on-site programmers that are experienced with Secure Data Commons Platform (formerly the Connected Vehicle Pilot Evaluation Platform; CVPEP), with specific expertise in cloud computing and Hadoop software utilities. The contractor must also have experience with connected vehicle systems to ensure that they can properly understand, process, conduct quality assessments, and evaluate the data.

B. Market Research.

The SDC Platform was built as a collaboration between an FHWA contractor REAN Cloud, and the Volpe Center, with assistance from Acrotron (under Geospatial IDIQ Task Order 0004). It is important that the SDC development and support work happen without schedule delays, so as to meet the FHWA’s CV Pilot program and evaluation goals. The staff searched in the quick market search (http://dsbs.sba.gov/dsbs/search/dsp_quicksearch.cfm) using the keywords “connected vehicle”, “cloud computing” and “Hadoop”.

No businesses in the database were returned when the term “connected vehicle” was used. Experience specifically with connected vehicle data is a requirement for this project as the contractor needs to have an in-depth understanding of connected vehicle data to complete the required data processing tasks. Only one company (FedCentric Technologies) was returned using the terms “cloud computing” and “Hadoop”, but a review of that company’s website did not indicate that they have experience with connected vehicles.

Programmer staff at SGT under the Volpe SOFITS onsite contract were also reviewed for their suitability for the contract, but none had the required experience with connected vehicle data. Any work from an outside company to enhance and continue work on the CV Pilot platform would first require an extensive learning curve that would impact the program, and all data suppliers in an unacceptably negative way. No firms other than Acrotron have expertise in connected vehicle data and with the required software utilities that will allow continuation of the project.

Acrotron is the only known resource capable of providing continued support for the SDC development, since they have extensive experience with connected vehicle data, they wrote the foundational code for the CV Pilot data ingest, transformation, storage, and tracking that will continue to be developed in this next phase of the project. Acrotron has extensive experience with setting up the security protocols, stress testing the system to ensure that it is robust under production level data streaming loads, and understand the underlying CV data and types of analyses that the end users wish to perform. Therefore, only Acrotron has the expertise and capabilities to meet the Government need.

C. Supporting Rationale.

(1) Sole Source: Only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.

(i) Acrotron has been involved in the development of the SDC (formerly the CVPEP) since its inception in June of 2017, and have developed the code that is the foundation of the platform. They have built and maintained key components of the system including all stages of the near real-time data ingest, transformation, tracking and loading into both the data lake and the data warehouse. They have a unique combination of experience in both cloud computing and CV data analysis. Acrotron has the expertise and knowledge required to create continuity in the SDC platform so that real-time data can continually be uploaded into environment and processed as it is produced (which is currently ongoing). The data being collected as part of the CV Pilot program are not stored locally at the pilot sites, but rather streamed directly to the SDC, and without a team to support data ingestion data http://dsbs.sba.gov/dsbs/search/dsp_quicksearch.cfm

Procurement Request No. V3371041

V220T.12 (01/15) will be lost. Additionally, any delays incurred by bringing on a new contractor would create delays in the quality assessments being conducted on the data as it is ingested into the SDC. If data are not assessed for quality by a team experienced with real-time connected vehicle data, the sites may be unknowingly providing erroneous data, resulting in a downstream impact on the evaluator’s ability to determine the impacts of the deployment.

(ii) Per the results of the market research overview, Acrotron is the only company with the experience and institutional knowledge required to perform and complete the required work to be able to begin data ingestion immediately.

Data are currently being live-streamed into the SDC system and without continuation of the Acrotron support to assist in loading and warehousing these data, the CV Pilot program will incur data loss and will therefore not be able to accomplish it’s ultimate goal of assessing the impacts of the deployments based on objective data. Acrotron is the only contractor that can begin ingesting data immediately.

(iii) Acrotron is the only software development company with the knowledge, expertise and capabilities to performing the necessary work to meet the government need to ingest all the relevant data and prepare the platform for the independent evaluations, which are currently scheduled to start in May of 2019. Acrotron has worked with the primary SDC developer (Rean Cloud), the CV Pilot data suppliers (Wyoming DOT, Tampa Hillsboro Expressway, and NYC DOT), the FHWA CV Pilot team, and the FHWA contracted CV Pilot Evaluators (Volpe and Texas Transportation Institute) and can ensure the required collaboration on this very complex project.

Not contracting with Acrotron to continue the development and support tasks on the SDC would prevent the Volpe Center and the many organizations under contract to FHWA on the CV Pilot program from uploading live data into the SDC, and conducting quality assessment on that data to ensure that it will support an evaluation of system impacts. Not providing the continuity required to complete the SDC development and support work would cause loss of the data that are being live-streamed to the SDC system. Data loss is unacceptable to the government because the data cannot be recovered, and it will prevent the program from meeting it’s ultimate goal, which is to use the data collected from the CV Pilot program to assess the impacts of the CV deployments.

(2) Brand Name: N/A.

(3) Unusual and Compelling Urgency: N/A.

(Signature required for procurements over $25,000)