BTS_RFI_Rail Performance Data.pdf

Request for Information

Agency/Office: Office of the Secretary (OST)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS)

Title: Rail Performance Data Program

Point of Contact: Contracting Officer Jason Bush, jason.bush@dot.gov

I. Introduction/Purpose

The Office of the Secretary of Transportation(OST)/Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) is issuing this Request for Information (RFI) to identify potential qualified sources, including, but not limited to Small Business (SB), Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB), 8(a) Certified SDB, HUBZone SB, SDVOSB, or WOSB concerns that may be interested in and capable of performing the work described herein for the Rail Performance Data Program.

OST/BTS welcomes all qualified sources with the appropriate NAICS Code and past experience to submit their Corporate Capability Statements that demonstrate their ability to successfully accomplish the goals of the proposed Rail Performance Data Program project as listed below. In addition to soliciting on the open market, the government may decide to later limit its competition to qualified GSA Professional Services Schedule (PSS) holding contractors, Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) or One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS).

OST/BTS does not intend to award a contract on the basis of responses to this notice or otherwise pay for the preparation of any information submitted. The Government reserves the right to not answer any follow up on questions before and/or after the submission of responses to this notice.

Acknowledgement of receipt of responses will not be made; and no formal evaluation of the information received will be conducted by OST/BTS. OST/BTS may, however, later issue a Request for Proposal (RFP). However, should such a requirement fail to materialize, no basis for claims against OST shall arise as a result of a response to this notice.

Review will be limited to the first TEN (10) responses. However, the Government reserves the right to review more, if necessary.

II. Background

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) is the independent statistical agency within the U.S.

Department of Transportation (USDOT). BTS is one of 13 principal federal statistical agencies and is a politically objective supplier of trusted and statistically sound baseline, contextual, and trend information used to shape transportation policy, investments, and research across the U.S. BTS is the preeminent source of statistics on commercial aviation, multimodal freight, and transportation economics. BTS is charged with collecting, compiling, analyzing, and publishing a comprehensive set of transportation statistics on the performance and impacts of the national transportation system.

The BTS Director is by law (49 U.S.C. 111(c)(2)) the senior advisor to the Secretary of Transportation on mailto:jason.bush@dot.gov data and statistics. BTS is governed primarily by statistical policy directives of the Office of Management and Budget and Title 49 of the United States Code.

As a federal statistical agency, BTS must meet both its mission requirements to collect and disseminate high quality transportation information and its legal and ethical obligations to respect the privacy of those who have provided the information.

When BTS collects transportation information for a statistical purpose under a pledge of confidentiality, BTS is required by law to protect the information. Respondents must be able to trust that information they provide to BTS shall be protected and not be subject to unauthorized disclosure.

For that reason, BTS implements confidentiality procedures to protect individually identifiable information.

BTS is authorized by law (49 U.S.C. 111(c)(2)) to collect transportation information for its various program needs. BTS confidentiality statute ((49 U.S.C. 111(i).)) and other laws (18 U.S.C. 1905; The Privacy Act of 1974; and Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act (CIPSEA) of 2002 (Public Law 107-347, Title V, Subtitle A)) protect the information BTS collects. These laws ensure that any identifying, sensitive, or proprietary information that BTS collects is not released to unauthorized persons or organizations.

The BTS Disclosure Review Board (DRB) reviews BTS information products for disclosures of confidential information prior to public dissemination. BTS DRB requires application of disclosure limitation methods to information products to protect the confidentiality of data. By doing this, BTS seeks to prevent anyone from using published statistical data to identify either an individual or business that has provided confidential information under a pledge of confidentiality.

III. Objectives

BTS requires timely and relevant authoritative data to create statistical and geospatial products that can be used to provide evidence to support policy and decision makers in USDOT’s OST, Operating Administrations, and other federal agencies (collectively known as BTS Federal Partners) as they address issues that are critical to making the nation’s rail transportation safer and more efficient. BTS seeks to obtain access via a license, subscription or other means, data derived from a series of sensors that detect trains, train lengths and other visible and/or detectable information about the train, and that are collected across the U.S. rail system in an automated and near real-time way (within approximately an hour of the train passing a sensor the data will be made available to BTS).

The goal is to receive data from strategic points on major rail segments throughout the U.S. The sensors shall be mobile or fixed detectors in order to determine train data elements. These data shall be available to BTS, BTS Federal Partners and contractors that sign an agreement with BTS. BTS acting as the Data Steward, will ingest and manage the data on a secure server environment. BTS will control and grant access to federal agencies per a signed data sharing agreement.

This level of actual source data shall allow real-time observations rather than just modeling to help understand how the rail network is being utilized. The products, tools, visualizations, and statistical products developed under this Rail Performance Data Program will supplement and extend data collected from traditional methods and will allow analysts to simultaneously evaluate and inform historic, real-time, and modeled performance evaluations of the national transportation system.

The products developed from the archive database created from this continuous data collection will provide users with data insights, perspectives, and spatiotemporal scales not currently available from the other tools and statistics available at the DOT.

The collected data shall be able to produce the following elements:

• Car counts on each train by type of car

• Average speed of the train

• Unique identification of the same train as it passes multiple sensors, classifying trains by type

(manifest, unit grain train, intermodal, container, etc.)

• UN codes from hazardous materials placards on railcars.

The data provider must ensure that all hazardous train data that is collected and provided as one of the data elements has restrictions for distribution and/or access by anyone outside of government entities in North America.

In addition to internal uses, BTS and BTS Federal Partners will perform analysis on the train/railcar data to generate statistics, metrics, maps, and summary data for public access. These products may be published on the BTS website or on its Open Data platform. The collected data shall be aggregated to provide at a minimum, the following metrics:

1. Weekly train counts by corridor/line and/or nodes by the train types with the corridors being between 2 major centers on the main lines and present an industry view.

2. Weekly observed train speed in miles per hour along key mainline corridors/lines by direction for all train types as an industry view.

3. Weekly counts of placarded dangerous/hazardous goods by corridor/line, however, this metric would be exclusively provided only to key government agencies upon signing an agreement.

4. Weekly observed train car types, container and trailer counts along key mainline corridors/lines and nodes by direction as a system view.

IV. Contractor’s Capability Statement

The purpose of this RFI is for USDOT to improve its understanding of market capabilities and to identify qualified vendors capable of providing Rail Performance Data. Interested vendors shall identify their capabilities to meet the requirements as specified in sections 1 – 4 below. Be very specific when describing experience that is similar in nature.

Page Limit and Format The capability statement shall be no more than 10 pages in length, single-spaced, with font sized 12 or larger. The document shall be in Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word format. Do NOT submit marketing material. Do NOT submit resumes.

Section 1 – Cover Letter

The cover letter must clearly identify the following information:

1. Company’s Name.

2. Company’s Address.

3. UEI Number.

4. Point of Contact(s) (Name, title, email, and phone number).

5 Identify your business size – Other than small, small disadvantaged, 8(a)-certified small disadvantaged, HUBZone small, woman-owned small, very small, veteran-owned small, service-disabled veteran-owned small.

6. Applicable GSA Schedule Contract No. (if any).

7. Other contract vehicles the DOT may consider for this requirement for which you are an awardee, if any (e.g., Government Wide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs), GSA Schedules, DHS Strategic Sourcing Contract).

8. Potential Teaming Partners or Subcontractors.

Note: If partnerships are being suggested to complete the work, please describe what areas the partners will be respectively working on and provide details on the approach and the capability.

Section 2 - Capabilities Statement

Submit a capabilities statement that includes basic information describing the company. The capabilities statement should also include a brief description of the company, products, services, history, ownership, financial information, and other information deemed relevant.

Section 3 – Corporate Experience

Provide up to three examples of projects of similar in size, scope, and complexity to the BTS requirements, preferably with the Federal Government. Briefly describe the scope of work, to include project management methodology, security requirements, best practices/lessons learned, and relevant metrics. Please also include the period of performance, total contract value, and whether the work was performed as a prime or sub-contractor or describe any teaming arrangements.

Section 4 – Technical Prompts

Based on the below technical questions, please describe your company's understanding of BTS requirements, including a general plan for how to meet USDOT objectives, recommended governance model, and organizational structure. Describe your company’s methodology for staffing this type of requirement in terms of workforce retention, recruiting/hiring process, personnel security, and clearance level.

Questionnaire

BTS has created a skills and technology questionnaire that will allow the opportunity for sources to provide an at-a-glance view of their expertise to meet the anticipated BTS requirements. Sources should complete this questionnaire as completely as possible. This does not count against the 10-page requirement for the Capability Statement.

All respondents should answer the following written questions below:

• How respondent data meets these requirements, especially vis-à-vis unimputed data.

• How respondent shall achieve and maintain continuous access to their train/sensor data source(s).

• How data are collected from each train using railcar id numbers.

• How respondent will ensure reliability of at least 95% uptime of all sensors and how they will continuously improve the railcar identification process to increase accuracy of the data results.

• How respondent will ensure maximum ease of access to BTS and BTS-authorized users and why this approach will maximize utility of the underlying data to all parties involved.

Bureau of Transportation Statistics Market Research-Rail Performance Data Program

• Please complete the following questionnaire.

• Place an X beside each requirement that your firm would be able to satisfy.

1. a. Can you provide a near real-time, national scale data collection of railcar and train data?

Yes in-house

Yes with partner No

b. If partnering, please provide details of partners and capabilities.

2. For the sensor technology used, please state if you can provide the following data elements on a per train basis, delivered within 1 hour:

Item Yes In-house Yes with Partner No Capability Date/Time of Observation

Weather Conditions Location of sensor that is observing train

Train Type Rail Company Direction of Train Speed of Train Train acceleration/deceleration

Train ID Car Type Placard on Car UN Code Car Initial Car Identifier Dangerous Goods Class Container/Trailer Container Size Container Identifier

3. Can the data listed in Question #3 be made available to BTS and all BTS Federal Partners?

Yes No With limitations

4. From the previous question, if with limitations, describe the limitiations.

5. Can you provide the following accuracy requirements?

Item Accuracy Yes In-house

Yes with Partner

No Capability

Car count of the cars on a train

To within +/- 2% of actual train lengths 98% of the time

Car number accuracy for cars on a train (if number obstructed by grafitti)

70% or better

Car type for the car detected

Correctly idendified 95% or better

Train tracking 99.9% or better of trains operating on the monitored network will be tracked with additional corrections to eliminate false positive for trains

UN Placard detection and reading

95% or better for detection of placard and 95% or better for capturing the UN code from all but the rarest human readable placards on tank cars.

6. Can your technology approach provide coverage for areas that have multiple tracks?

Yes No

7. Has technology reliability and testing been done?

8. Please list sensor operating temperatures and weather conditions operabilities below:

• Temperate ranges between minimum ____ degrees F and maximum ________ degrees F

• Waterproof to what standard-IP68 or _____

• Can withstand wind speeds up to _____ mph

• Can support full operational capabilities during total darkness? Yes/No

• What conditions might degrade sensor capability, such as dust, fog, etc? please list

9. Can your technology support 24/7 operations?

10. Can you assure that your technology will not interupt any railway operations?

11. a. Will sensors be placed off the railroad right of way or a fixed on-board equipment device?

Off-site

On- Board

Other

b. If located off-site indicate placement location with approximate optimal distance from railroad tracks.

12. Do you have site permissions for sensor placement?

13. Indicate estimated time to implement sensors to full operational capability? Full operational capability would be for sensors to be placed and operational at key locations across the US regardless of track owner or time/investments to equip on board sensors.

14. What type of connectivity do your sensors require to communicate with the database/platform?

Connectivity Method wifi cellular fiber twisted pair/copper On board storage/manual upload other

15. What type of power supply is used for sensors

Power supply Primary Back-up A/C power line

Yes No Need to acquire

6 months or less

6 months to 1 year More than 1 year battery solar Other (indicate)

16. Can your hazmat data collection and disseminnation approach protect the restricted HAZMAT car/train information from non-approved entities outside of the government in North America?

Yes No With limitations

17. From previous question, if with limitations, describe the limitiations?