Attachment 1 - BRAND NAME J_AND_A - Matlab (redacted).pdf

LIMITED SOURCE JUSTIFICATION BRAND NAME ACQUISITION

This limited source justification was created in accordance with FAR 6.303-2, the brand name, product, or feature described herein is essential to the Government’s requirements, and market research indicates other companies’ similar products, or products lacking the feature, do not meet, or cannot be modified to meet, the agency’s needs. The acquisition referenced herein is conducted in accordance with FAR subparts 12.6, 13.5 and 41 U.S.C.1901

1. REQUIRING AGENCY AND CONTRACTING OFFICE: The requesting Agency is the Space Development Agency. The contracting office is the Space Development Agency Contracting Cell.

2. NATURE/DESCRIPTION OF ACTION(S) BEING APPROVED: A new firm-fixed price purchase order is requested that will be funded with FY 2023 O&M dollars. The contract will target a September 2023 delivery timeframe to support the SDA Tracking Cell and PWSA Futures.

3. DESCRIPTION OF SUPPLIES OR SERVICES REQUIRED TO MEET THE AGENCY’S NEEDS:

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. This tool is widely used across the Department of Defense and USG as well as in industry and research institutions for both modeling and simulation (M&S) and development and deployment of software and firmware tools. The combination of a powerful programming and numeric computing engine with a strong technical support and documentation base will significantly reduce labor on the part of SDA due to the toolkits and packages included in this procurement. These packages provide the necessary and verified subroutines to facilitate rapid modeling and simulation of advanced communications techniques. For example, the SDA Optical Communications Standard uses the 5G New Radio Standard for forward error correction (FEC). The MATLAB 5G Toolbox provides the FEC algorithms for encoding and decoding data as well as end-to-end examples. Through leveraging this resource, SDA personnel can effectively analyze system-level problems (without the associated labor and cost/schedule risk) to develop low-level functions themselves.

4. IDENTIFICATION OF LIMITED SOURCE AUTHORITY AND SUPPORTING

RATIONALE:

The MATLAB software package (an abbreviation of “MATrix LABoratory”) is a widely used proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numerical computing environment developed by Mathworks. The core MATLAB package and associated toolkits required by SDA are only available from Mathworks.

5. BEST VALUE DETERMINATION:

The prices received under the proposed contracting method will represent the best value, as the agreed to prices will be based upon competitive quotes received from authorized retailers of the brand in a competitive environment. Therefore, the price paid will represent the best value and result in the lowest overall cost alternative to meet the needs of SDA.

6. MARKET RESEARCH:

SDA will continue to evaluate alternatives to MATLAB in support of the objective of precluding the necessity for future brand name acquisition of the same supplies/services. Current Commercially of the Shelf (COTS) and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) competitors have been identified, including an open-source clone of MATLAB (Octave) and freely-available programming environments (e.g. Python).

While the core MATLAB package has been partially cloned by Octave, the toolkits that provide significant labor and cost/schedule risk savings are not provided by this FOSS alternative. To employ Octave, significant development would be required. Python provides many capabilities that can replace or augment MATLAB for M&S. However, by nature of its packages being FOSS, the quality of special test tools is highly varied. It is assessed that Python as an alternative to MATLAB would require an order-of-magnitude more labor and that it would impart significant cost/schedule risk. SDA will continue to monitor the market in support of the stated market research objective. MATLAB is the best choice since it is approved on DARPA’s classified network that it will be installed on.

7. ANY OTHER SUPPORTING FACTS:

SDA will use MATLAB to analyze raw and processed data to generate independent results and verify system performance. It will also be used to generate documents for communicating results to SDA leadership and interact with the community.

8. ACTIONS THE AGENCY MAY TAKE TO REMOVE BARRIERS THAT LED TO THE

RESTRICTED CONSIDERATION:

Following the discussion in (6) above, SDA will monitor the alternative tools available in the market. In addition, as the use of specific tools becomes widespread and standardized at the agency, SDA will evaluate the return on investment of custom tool development.

REQUIREMENTS CERTIFICATION: I certify that the supporting data under my cognizance which are included in the J&A are accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

TITLE/ORGANIZATION: Chief, Enterprise Operations Space Development Agency

CONTRACTING OFFICER CERTIFICATION: I certify that this justification is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

TITLE/ORGANIZATION: Contracting Officer Space Development Agency