RFI_SCP_2020 27 JUL.docx

1.0 INTRODUCTION

This publication constitutes a Request for Information (RFI) as defined in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 15.201(e), "Exchanges with Industry before receipt of Proposals, Request for Information".

Respondents should note that no funding has been specifically reserved for this announcement. We are soliciting Requests for Information abstracts only. Do not submit a white paper or proposal at this time.

2.0 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME

Department of Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate

AFRL/RISB

RFI-AFRL-RIK-20-15

26 Electronic Parkway Rome, NY, 13441-4514

3.0 REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI)

The Air Force is interested in novel methods to facilitate remote collaboration between military planners, developing plans within a system that supports user-definability of planning roles and processes, capable of capturing the nuances and complexities of planning and supportive of the diverse specialties of the various planning experts participating in the planning process. To this end, AFRL seeks information on technical concepts, approaches, and merits of the ideas of work pertaining to remote collaboration, user-definable composable workflows, simultaneous access of plan data, user-defined semantic definition of planner roles, planning process, and planning data, and web-based dynamic visualization of data driven by system parameters and info-viz rules and best practices for data display. AFRL seeks information on new ideas, algorithms, research, prototypes, and concepts to support new paradigms for composable collaborative planning.

This RFI also seeks to obtain information about pricing, delivery, and other market information or capabilities for possible use in a future Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). This announcement is not a request for proposals; therefore, responses to the RFI are not considered offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract. Refer to Section 6 of this announcement for instructions on submitting an RFI abstract. All submissions must be unclassified.

3.1 RFI ABSTRACTS

To help guide the RFI process the following questions would be appropriate and should be considered when responding to this request.

1. What are you trying to do?

2. How is it done today?

3. What is new or innovative in your approach?

4. If you are successful, what difference will it make?

5. What are the risks and payoffs?

6. How much will it cost? How long will it take?

7. What are the midterm and final "exams" to check for success?

Abstracts should contain, in sufficient detail, information to enable the Government to determine whether the technical concept and/or capabilities should be reflected in a future BAA.

3.2 RFI SUBMISSIONS

Submission of an abstract is voluntary and is not required to propose to subsequent Broad Agency Announcements (if any) on this topic. Respondents are advised that AFRL is under no obligation to provide feedback with respect to any information submitted under this RFI.

RFI abstract due date 10 AUG 2020.

4.0 TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS:

Planning is an integral part of military operations. It is an involved process that requires hundreds of experts working in concert to develop the plan needed to conduct military operations and fulfill Commander’s Intent. Many times, these planning experts are geographically dispersed and only capable of large-scale collaboration planning during prescheduled events. The Air Force seeks to determine if remote collaboration on planning activities is possible for the purposes of both improving the speed of plan development and the quality of the resultant plans.

Targeted Use Case: The OPLAN is the ultimate joint all-domain plan, detailing the strategic objectives and optimal winning strategy against a specific nation-state or adversary. More importantly, it explicitly details the set of actions and the associated flow of resources and forces that the joint (and coalition) force need to take to win the war. The OPLAN implements commander’s intent and specifies how to: Resource, Sustain, Transport, Schedule, and Maintain all direct and supporting materiel for up to 30 days after the start of phase one engagement. The complexity of the resulting OPLAN is immense - requiring two years, many hundreds of subject matter experts, and tens of thousands of man-hours to develop. The US has generated and updated many OPLANs over the past decade using the current process and tooling. This status quo for planning is known to be both large in time and human resources required for development. Given the more dynamic nature of the world today, the utility of static, hard-copy plans with long revision cycles is less desirable than it has been historically.

This request is specifically interested in technologies that would provide collaborative planning capabilities. In particular, this RFI is seeking information on technologies and techniques to aid one of the most resource intensive phases of the OPLAN development process – that is the resourcing and flow of materiel against strategic objectives, or commonly referred to as Force Flow planning. This planning stage takes as input the strategic plan (how we will win the war) and identifies, schedules, and places materiel against the strategy to make it executable. This process spans everything from identifying, transporting, maintaining, and fueling an aircraft to the scheduling, transporting, housing, feeding, and protecting the countless teams needed to support it and each and every weapon system brought to bear. This process is both time and resource intensive requiring up to 24 months to develop [1]. However, accelerating this process is non-trivial. The breadth and depth of the problem suggests a more functionally independent approach, which lends itself to parallelization. On the other hand, the planning stages are inherently dependent across resources and time, which limits the ability to plan in parallel, while also introducing plan inconsistencies and conflicts. This request is seeking technologies to support or address the allocation of resources to a plan in a collaborative and parallel fashion. While the focus is on supporting the OPLAN development process any technologies to support the plan resourcing are of interest.

This RFI looks to explore is how to reconcile the seemingly opposing demands for a force flow-planning solution for reducing the planning time by an order of magnitude as compared to the status quo. On the one hand, the global dependent nature of the problem suggests a global approach to the solution – yet the complexity means a solution will far exceed any human planner capacity. What if we could provide a shared context of the plan?

On the other hand, the breadth and depth of the problem and need for highly specialized solutions indicates a functional decomposition and bottoms up approach – yet this introduces significant conflicts that must be reconciled and refined through costly iterations. What if each planner had tools to help them maintain their context of the plan and catered to their specific specialization?

Specifically, there is interest in any technology that may be appropriate to: 1) Overcome the global complexity problem by leveraging dependency & assumption tracking techniques and 2) Develop a composable and collaborative planning framework to enable parallel planning across the diverse set of highly specialized teams. With both of these components, it’s believed that a significant reduction in planning time can be realized.

While not limited to the following, it’s envisioned that remote, collaborative planning will consist of two distinct, yet intertwined, thrusts:

1) Shared Context Management & Analysis: What would it take to achieve a shared context – how to disseminate and provide awareness of planning attributes and make the information available to all teams engaged in the planning process in a parallel and collaborative nature?

2) Tailored Plan Presentation: How can planners be allowed to maintain their individual planning context with support for their distinct specialization(s) - how to provide tailored planning tools and information to support specialized planning teams requirements?

Shared Context Management and Analysis: The underlying resource and scheduling required to identify, track, and manage resource, and timing dependencies and constraints as well as planner assumptions and intent. It involves concepts needed to define the role of a single planner in the larger context, as well as planning artifacts and process and how they map to roles. This includes methods for identifying, tracking, and managing resource and scheduling changes and dependencies across all planning phases. It also means the modeling and tracking of assumptions about individual planning stages and teams such that progress on the plan continue with explicit knowledge and management of the assumptions.

· Support planning collaboratively and in parallel.

· Reduce collaboration “friction” to allow planners to concentrate on planning.

· Allow planning organizations to define and codify their planning process in the system so the system integrates seamlessly with their workflow.

· Allow the same organizations to change that planning process definition as their processes change and evolve over time.

· To the maximum extent possible, support interoperability with existing planning tools and Systems of Record (SoRs).

· Allow for decomposition of plan artifacts so that portions of the plan can by updated simultaneously.

· Provide a mechanism for the planning organization to model planners as computational units with a rich Input/Output description, allowing plan data, planning process, and planner roles to be part of a single, cohesive model for planning.

· Allow monitoring of overall plan progression.

· Evaluate for applicability to the problem domain and re-use to the maximum extent possible planning and collaboration semantic ontologies such as: the Collaborative Planning Model (CPM) [2], P-PLAN [3], EP-PLAN [4], and others [5].

Tailored Plan Presentation: The means for presenting role-specific plan information to the planner and the creation of interfaces for interacting with local and linked plans. Enables personalized plan representation that will provide each member of the planning team, and the roles they fulfill, with views into pertinent aspects of the plan that are rich, meaningful, yet easily understood.

This will focus on technologies capable of developing a composable framework to support local planning teams while being globally connected by the sharing of context.

· Leverage the planner role I/O definitions to provide access to the appropriate plan data to the planner based on their role and the tasks they are completing.

· Provide that data in visual representations based on information visualization principles and practices, organizational requirements, and individual user preferences.

· Allow for presentation for overall plan progress.

· Identify visual representations that best support understanding.

· Provide the user-interface that allows the organization to define the planning process and planner roles.

· Ability to represent logistics requirements and data to operational planners in forms that are easily understandable so that logistics can be incorporated in initial plan iterations.

Bibliography

5.0 TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS:

There are several technical objectives that must be balanced to support remote collaborative planning:

· Solutions must be applicable to various planning organizations and echelons

· Technology stack should be accreditable to operate on approved military networks

· Classification concerns due to aggregation of data

Outside the scope of this RFI: The Air Force is currently not interested in service providers for this effort or replacement for any existing planning tools or Systems of Record (SoRs). The intent of this RFI is to explore potential technologies and future concepts to achieve the Shared context and collaborative planning vision.

6.0 REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) ABSTRACTS

6.1 CONTENT

All abstracts shall state that they are submitted in response to this announcement.

RFI responses shall include the company name, address and the title, telephone number, mail and e-mail addresses of the point of contact having the authority and knowledge to discuss the RFI submission.

The Government is assessing the current state-of-the-art and future remote, collaborative, parallel planning capabilities. The RFI responses should describe the product solution proposed, addressed coverage of the requirements stated in this RFI by the proposed solution, explain the potential advantage to the Air Force, and provide a rough order of magnitude for the cost of the proposed solution.

6.2 SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS

Multiple abstracts within the purview of this RFI announcement may be submitted by each responder.

6.3 SUBMISSION

RFI abstract due date is RFI abstract due date 10 AUG 2020.

6.4 FORMAT

The abstracts will be formatted as follows:

Section A: Title, Technical Area, Period of Performance (if applicable), 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: Technical Summary.

The abstracts shall be limited to 8 pages. All abstracts shall be double spaced in no smaller than 12 font size. All submissions must be unclassified. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the Technical POC listed in Section 7 of this announcement.

Respondents are required to submit at least one electronic copy to the Government technical point of contact (TPOC) in Microsoft Office Word. AFRL/RI is not responsible for undelivered emails. Please confirm receipt of all submission with the TPOC.

7.0 AGENCY CONTACTS

Verification of government receipt or questions of a technical nature can also be directed to the cognizant TPOCs.

Primary TPOC:

Chad Salisbury Telephone: 315-330-7804 Email: chad.salisbury@us.af.mil Secondary TPOC:

Aaron McVay Telephone: 315-330-4780 Email: aaron.mcvay.3@us.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant Contracting Officer, as specified below:

Amber Buckley Telephone: (315) 330-3605 Email: amber.buckley@us.af.mil