W911NF-17-S-0005_IOBT_Program_Announcement.pdf

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. OVERVIEW OF THE FUNDING OPPORTUNITY

A. REQUIRED OVERVIEW CONTENT

1. FEDERAL AGENCY NAME

2. RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY TITLE

3. ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE

4. RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY NUMBER

5. CATALOG OF FEDERAL DOMESTIC ASSISTANCE (CFDA) NUMBER

AND TITLE

6. RESPONSE DATES

B. ADDITIONAL OVERVIEW INFORMATION

II. DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT THE FUNDING OPPORTUNITY

A. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

1. ARL INTERNET OF BATTLEFIELD THINGS VISION

2. ARL INTERNAL MISSION AND RELATED PROGRAMS

3. CRA PROGRAMMATIC STRATEGY

4. CRA RESEARCH STRATEGY

5. COLLABORATION

6. MANAGEMENT

7. FUNDING

B. AWARD INFORMATION

C. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION

1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS

2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING

D. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION

1. ADDRESS TO REQUEST APPLICATION PACKAGE

2. CONTENT AND FORMAT OF APPLICATION SUBMISSION

3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES

4. INTERGOVERNMENTAL REVIEW – NOT APPLICABLE

5. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS

6. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

E. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION

1. EVALUATION CRITERIA

2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS

3. RECIPIENT QUALIFICATION

F. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION

1. AWARD NOTICES

2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS

3. REPORTING

G. AGENCY CONTACTS

I. OVERVIEW OF THE FUNDING OPPORTUNITY

A. REQUIRED OVERVIEW CONTENT

1. Federal Agency Name: U.S. Army Research Laboratory, 2800 Powder Mill Road, Adelphi, MD 20783-1197

Issuing Acquisition Office: U.S. Army Contracting Command – Aberdeen

Proving Ground, Research Triangle Park (RTP) Division, 800 Park Office Drive, Suite #4229, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709

2. Research Opportunity Title: Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) Collaborative

Research Alliance (CRA)

3. Announcement Type: Initial

4. Research Opportunity Number: W911NF-17-S-0005

5. Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) Number(s): 12.630 - "Basic, Applied, and Advanced Research in Science and Engineering"

6. Response Dates: The following is a summary of the events and dates associated with the IoBT CRA Program Announcement (PA):

EVENT ESTIMATED DATE/TIMEFRAME

PA released 3 March 2017 Opportunities Conference 27 March 2017 Deadline for Questions on PA 24 April 2017 Whitepapers due 8 May 2017 Whitepaper Feedback/Invitation to Submit Proposal Early June 2017 Proposals due 27 July 2017 Award September 2017

B. ADDITIONAL OVERVIEW INFORMATION

Purpose: The ability of the Army to understand, predict, adapt, and exploit the vast array of internetworked things that will be present of the future battlefield is critical to maintaining and increasing its competitive advantage. The explosive growth of technologies in the commercial sector that exploits the convergence of cloud computing, ubiquitous mobile communications, networks of data-gathering sensors, and artificial intelligence presents an imposing challenge for the Army. These Internet of Things (IoT) technologies will give our enemies ever increasing capabilities that must be countered, but commercial developments do not address the unique challenges that the Army will face in using them.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has established an Enterprise approach to address the challenges resulting from the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) that couples multi-disciplinary internal research with extramural research and collaborative ventures.

ARL intends to establish a new collaborative venture (the IoBT CRA) that seeks to develop the foundations of IoBT in the context of future Army operations. The Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA) will consist of private sector and government researchers working jointly to solve complex problems. The overall objective is to develop the fundamental understanding of dynamically-composable, adaptive, goal-driven IoBTs to enable predictive analytics for intelligent command and control and battlefield services.

For the purposes of this CRA, an Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) can be summarized as a set of interdependent and interconnected entities (e.g. sensors, small actuators, control components, networks, information sources, etc.) or “things” that are: dynamically composed to meet multiple mission goals; capable of adapting to acquire and analyze data necessary to predict behaviors/activities, and effectuate the physical environment; self-aware, continuously learning, autonomous, and autonomic, where the things interact with networks, humans, and the environment in order to enable predictive decision augmentation that delivers intelligent command and control and battlefield services.

The IoBT is the realization of pervasive computing, communication, and sensing where everything will be a sensor and potentially a processor (i.e. increased number of heterogeneous devices, connectivity, and communication) where subsequent information is of a scale unseen before. The battlespace itself will consist of active red (enemy), blue (friendly), and gray (non-participant) resources, where deception will be the norm, the environment (e.g. megacities and rural) will be dynamic, and ownership and other boundaries will be diverse and transient. These IoBT characteristics all translate into increased complexity for the warfighter, requiring situation-adaptive responses, selective collection/processing and real time sensemaking over massive heterogeneous data.

To achieve the CRA’s vision a different research approach is imperative. Current research structures for the commercial the Internet of Things allow research to proceed independently along commercial/industrial stovepipes. This partitioning of scientific contributions will not address the complexity of Army problems. The IoBT CRA is expected to foster a new way of conducting collaborative research that breaks down research barriers, builds new collaborative relationships, and develops mutual understanding across organizations, technical and scientific disciplines, and Research Areas. ARL strongly believes that a joint collaborative approach by a multidisciplinary researcher team is required to make fundamental advances towards meeting the CRA research objectives and overall vision.

ARL has identified three interrelated aspects or Research Areas specific to the IoBT CRA vision that when jointly studied will advance the theoretical foundations of IoBT phenomena. In addition, advancing the theoretical foundations that impact the challenges of these three Research Areas (RAs) requires trans-disciplinary research that takes into account the adversarial and security concerns of the Cyber-Physical IoBT. This Cross- Cutting Research Issue (CCRI) addressing Cyber-Physical Security must be studied jointly in the context and constraints of the three identified Research Areas. The three Research Areas and Cross Cutting Research Issue are defined as follows:

Discovery, Composition and Adaptation of Goal-Driven Heterogeneous IoBTs: Novel mathematical theories and scientific insights leading to scalable composition and management of heterogeneous IoBTs enabling secure information sharing to meet multiple dynamic mission goals.

Autonomic IoBTs to Enable Intelligent Services: Theoretical foundations, models, and methods of autonomic complex systems that deliver adaptive cyber-physical capabilities and services necessary to enable effective command and control across military (blue), adversary (red), and civilian (gray) domains.

Distributed Asynchronous Processing and Analytics of Things: Scientific principles, theories, and methods and enable predictive processing, analytics, and anomaly detection of broadly heterogeneous and varied data, that may be unknown combinations of sparse and voluminous; centralized and distributed; and trusted and suspect for the purposes of augmenting goal-driven decision-making.

Cyber-Physical Security: Theoretical and pragmatic cross-cutting methods that address the challenges of the above research areas, while enriching the resiliency of the IoBT, such that it can be hardened against tampering and adversarial compromise, continue operating under attacks, and provide bounded guarantees of performance.

A foundational problem to be addressed by the RAs and CCRI is the fundamental understanding of how to learn and devise complex models of IoBT goals, networks, information, and analytics that enable intelligent command and control, and battlefield services. A critical issue embedded throughout all aspects of IoBTs is cyber physical security, as the Army will need to use things it does not control (e.g. adversarial and open/allies’ resources), accommodate deceptive data, and counter advanced persistent threats. Joint research in the RAs and CCRI should lead to deep, persistent, and meaningful collaboration among the Alliance and should synchronize definitions, ontologies, metrics, representations, and processes to build understanding of how to learn and devise complex models of IoBT mission-goals, networks, information, and analytics to enable intelligent command and control and battlefield services.

The proposed research should develop appropriate mathematical representations, models, methods, and analysis techniques. Expected outcomes are principled theories and fundamental methods that lead to greater utility, efficiency, and control of the IoBT.

Validation of theories and models through principled experimentation should be a critical aspect of the proposed research. While theoretical and fundamental research prosed effort should retain focus on accomplishing IoBT mission-goals as well as simplifying the complexity of IoBT command and control, while minimizing negative impacts on Army operations.

The CRA is intended to foster collaborative basic research (Budget Activity 1 - see definition below) involving the Consortium and the Government. ARL’s strategy is to continue exploiting research and expertise where it exists through the issuance of a single award through this Program Announcement. Collaboration between the Consortium and the Government is integral to the execution and success of the CRA. It is ARL's strong belief that work conducted under the IoBT CRA cannot be successful, either in whole or in part, without collaboration. That is, collaboration among the members of the Consortium and the Government Members of the Alliance is integral to the execution of the research program and achieve the IoBT CRA vision.

Award Instrument: This PA is expected to result in the award of a cooperative agreement (CA) as defined at 31 U.S.C. 6305 for the execution of the program. The CA will be awarded to a Consortium of organizations that may include institutions of higher education, and industrial and non-profit organizations.

The Consortium must be led by an institution of higher education charged with spearheading the focused basic research program. This organization will be designated as the Lead Research Organization (LRO). Each Research Area will be led by a Lead Research Area Organization (LRAO), one of which could also be the LRO. Together the LRO and LRAOs make up the Consortium, who are responsible for shaping and steering the CRA through collaboration, with ARL. Performance under the CA may also include other organizations as subawardees to the LRO. To assure the creation of a well-focused research program, the number of partners should balance the need for expertise in all three Research Areas and the Cross Cutting Research Issue with the need to maintain a focused, cohesive, well-integrated research program.

Proposal Submission: The application process (see PART II.D) consists of a Whitepaper stage and a Proposal stage. The purpose of requesting Whitepapers is to minimize the effort associated with the production of detailed proposals for those Applicants that have little chance of being selected for funding. The Government’s decision to invite a Proposal will be based upon the evaluation results of the Whitepaper submission. Only the most highly rated Whitepapers will receive an invitation from the Government to submit a Proposal. Applicants that do NOT receive invitations from the Government to submit a Proposal are NOT eligible to submit Proposals and will NOT receive feedback or a “debriefing” on their Whitepaper. Applicants invited to submit Proposals will receive feedback on their Whitepapers in order to improve their Proposal submissions. If an Applicant has NOT submitted a Whitepaper, they may NOT submit a Proposal for consideration for funding. Applicants should note that there are page limitations and other requirements associated with the submission process for both the Whitepaper and the Proposal. Submissions in connection with this PA are due by the date and time specified in PART II.D.3.

Period of Performance: The Award made as a result of this PA will provide for a period of performance of five years, with an optional five-year extension period.

Place of Performance: There is no limitation on the place of performance for any organization participating under the CA.

Funding: This PA is issued subject to the availability of funds. ARL has submitted the requisite documents to request funding for the period covered by the CA. However, Applicants are reminded that this request is subject to Presidential, Congressional and Departmental approval. The PA provides the estimated funding levels for the Basic Research (6.1) for the IoBT CRA. The funding levels provided in the PA are for Whitepaper and Proposal preparation purposes only. The actual funding level of the CA will be updated annually as part of the appropriation process. Further, this PA identifies additional levels of funding to potentially enhance the research program with additional basic and applied research funds. It is expected that during performance there will be opportunities to secure this additional funding from ARL or other Government agencies to enhance the core basic research program.

Profit/Fee: In accordance with 32 Code Federal Regulations (CFR) §22.205, profit/fee is not permitted under the CA.

Cost Sharing: Cost sharing is not required under this PA. During the evaluation of proposals, any cost sharing will be evaluated as it relates to the evaluation factors listed in the PA, based on the degree to which the proposed cost sharing enhances the proposal to result in added benefits to the IoBT CRA. To allow for evaluation of a proposed cost sharing, a proposal should express a firm commitment to provide such cost share and evidence a process for integrating the cost share into the collaborative research program.

Evaluation and Award: Evaluation and Award in connection with this PA will be performed in accordance with PART II.E. Whitepapers and Proposals that are in compliance with the requirements of the PA will be evaluated in accordance with merit based, competitive procedures. These procedures will include evaluation factors and an adjectival and color rating system. A Review Team, consisting of a qualified group of scientists, managers and business specialists, will evaluate both the Whitepapers and Proposals and provide the results of that evaluation to the decision maker for the Government. The decision maker will make both the decisions concerning the Whitepaper down selection and award selection.

Opportunity Day: An Opportunity Day meeting will be held to discuss this PA and to encourage dialogue, interchange and teaming related to responding to the PA. The meeting will be held at the US Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD on Monday, 27 March, 2017. While attendance is strongly encouraged, attendance at this meeting is not a requirement for submission of a Whitepaper or Proposal in connection with the IoBT CRA Program. Registration details can be found on the IoBT CRA Program website at www.arl.army.mil/cra/IoBT/. The presentations from this meeting, the list of attendees, and the non-proprietary questions posed and answers provided will be made available on the above mentioned website for the benefit of all interested parties. Information presented, written or oral, during the Opportunity Day meeting will not change this PA. Any changes to this PA will be issued via an amended PA being posted in grants.gov.

Contact Information. Outside of questions posed at the Opportunity Day, all questions or comments concerning this PA shall be submitted to the Government through the IoBT CRA Program website at www.arl.army.mil/cra/IoBT/. Comments or questions submitted should be concise and to the point, eliminating any unnecessary verbiage. In addition, the relevant part and paragraph of the PA to which a comment or question pertains should be referenced.

Responses to non-proprietary questions received will be posted to the IoBT CRA Program website under the “General Information/Questions & Answers" section for the benefit of all interested parties. All clearly identified and marked proprietary questions posed will be responded to via an individual email response. Applicants are encouraged to submit any questions as early as possible. The deadline for submission of questions which will be answered under this PA is 24 April 2017. Any answers provided to questions do not change the requirements of this PA. Any changes to this PA will be issued via an amended PA posted in grants.gov.

II. DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT THE FUNDING OPPORTUNITY

A. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

1. ARL Internet of Battlefield Things Vision

The ability of the Army to understand, predict, adapt, and exploit the vast array of internetworked things that will be present of the future battlefield is critical to maintaining and increasing its competitive advantage. The explosive growth of technologies in the commercial sector that exploits the convergence of cloud computing, ubiquitous mobile communications, networks of data-gathering sensors, and artificial intelligence presents an imposing challenge for the Army. These Internet of Things (IoT) technologies will give our enemies ever increasing capabilities that must be countered, but commercial developments do not address the unique challenges that the Army will face in using them.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has established an Enterprise approach to address the challenges resulting from the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) that couples multi-disciplinary internal research with extramural research and collaborative ventures.

ARL intends to establish a new collaborative venture (the IoBT CRA) that seeks to develop the foundations of IoBT in the context of future Army operations. The Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA) will consist of private sector and government researchers working jointly to solve complex problems. The overall objective is to develop the fundamental understanding of dynamically-composable, adaptive, goal-driven IoBTs to enable predictive analytics for intelligent command and control and battlefield services.

The Future Army will operate in a highly complex and rapidly changing environment, thus the U.S. Army’s Operating Concept is to “Win in a Complex World”. The Army must tackle wicked problems wherein objectives and constraints evolve in unpredictable ways.

Complexity arises from the increasing heterogeneity, connectivity, scale, dynamics, functionality and interdependence of networked elements, and from the increasing velocity and momentum of human interactions and information. Events now unfold in internet time, as noted by the Defense Science Board (DSB) 2014 Study on Decisive Army Strategic and Expeditionary Maneuver. In this context, future IoBTs will be significantly more complex that today’s networked systems, and novel mathematical approaches and techniques will be needed to represent them, reason about them, understand their behaviors, and to provide predictive analytics in diverse and dynamic environments.

The Army will use IoTs for diverse and dynamic missions and will require rapid deployment and adaptation in environments with high mobility, resource constraints, and extreme heterogeneity in both very dense and sparse environments. In addition to Things and IoTs that the Army owns and controls, it may also need to make use of IoTs that it does not own or fully control. A foundational problem to be addressed by the CRA is the fundamental understanding of how to learn and devise complex models of IoBT goals, networks, information, and analytics to enable intelligent command and control, and battlefield services. A critical issue embedded throughout all aspects of IoBTs is cyber physical security as the Army will need to use things it does not control (military (blue), adversary (red), civilian (gray)), accommodate deceptive data, and counter advanced persistent threats.

ARL strongly believes that a joint collaborative approach by multidisciplinary researchers is required to make fundamental advances towards meeting the CRA goal to develop a fundamental understanding of IoBTs. ARL has identified three interrelated Research Areas (RAs) that when jointly studied will advance the theoretical foundations of IoBTs in the context of future Army operations.

Discovery, Composition and Adaptation of Goal-Driven Heterogeneous IoBTs

Autonomic IoBTs to Enable Intelligent Services

Distributed Asynchronous Processing and Analytics of Things

In addition to these three RAs, Cyber-Physical Security has been identified as a Cross- Cutting Research Issue (CCRI) that is inherent in each of the RAs and that must be jointly studied with the RAs to make fundamental advances in IoBTs.

The CRA is intended to create a collaborative environment that enables the Alliance to advance the state-of-the-art and to take advantage of the diverse scientific capabilities and viewpoints of both the private sector and government researchers. The CRA will work collaboratively with ARLs Enterprise research programs to identify areas where joint, multi-disciplinary, collaborative research is advantageous. Continuous collaboration, technical exchanges, site visits, and staff rotations will strengthen and improve the CRA research and its Army relevance.

2. ARL Internal Mission and Related Programs

The IoBT CRA will become an integral part of ARL’s Science & Technology (S&T) Campaign Strategy. Collaboration with the internal IoBT research program and the Information Science campaign is critical to its success, and interactions with other related ARL research programs may bring different insights to bear on the CRA’s research problems. Moreover, interactions with ARL’s analysis and operations elements may increase relevance of CRA research and eventually lead to transition of research results.

ARL’s Internal Mission

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is the Army's corporate research laboratory whose mission is to discover, innovate, and transition science and technology to ensure dominant strategic land power. Three Directorates of ARL -- the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD), the Human Research and Engineering Directorate (HRED), and Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate (SEDD) – conduct research related to IoBT and it is expected that CRA researchers will collaborate with researchers in these Directorates. ARL will specifically fund in-house staff to foster direct highly collaborative partnerships between Consortium and Government researchers.

ARL's Army Research Office (ARO) serves as the Army's premier extramural basic research agency and it is expected that there may be opportunities to interact with their extramural programs.

Full details about ARL’s organization and strategic planning can be found on the ARL website: https://www.arl.army.mil

ARL has developed eight S&T campaigns: Extramural Basic Research, Computational Sciences, Materials Research, Sciences for Maneuver, Information Sciences, Sciences for Lethality and Protection, Human Sciences, and Assessment and Analysis. The research program envisioned for the IoBT CRA crosses a number of Campaigns:

Information Sciences is focused on gaining a greater understanding of emerging technology opportunities that support intelligent information systems that perform acquisition, analysis, reasoning, decision-making, collaborative communication, and assurance of information and knowledge through Sensing and Effecting, System Intelligence and Intelligent Systems, Human and Information Interaction, Networks and Communications, and Cyber Security.

Human Sciences is focused on gaining a greater understanding of individual physical, perceptual, and cognitive performance through Human-Physical Interface, Human- Human Interface, and Human-Technology Interface.

Extramural Basic Research is focused on steering and oversight of systematic studies to increase fundamental knowledge and understanding in the Physical Sciences, Information Sciences, Life Sciences, and Engineering Sciences related to long-term national security needs.

Computational Sciences is focused on advancing the fundamentals of Predictive Simulation Sciences, Data Intensive Sciences, Computing Sciences, and emerging Computing Architectures to transform the future of complex Army applications.

Full details and a full listing of related ARL campaigns can be found on the ARL website.

ARL's Open Campus is a collaborative endeavor, with the goal of building a science and technology ecosystem that will encourage groundbreaking advances in basic and applied research areas of relevance to the Army. Through the Open Campus framework, ARL scientists and engineers will work collaboratively and side-by-side with visiting scientists in ARL's facilities, and as visiting researchers at collaborators' institutions. Central to the research collaborations is mutual scientific interest and investment by all partners. The global academic community, industry, small businesses, and other government laboratories benefit from this engagement through collaboration with ARL's specialized research staff and unique technical facilities. These collaborations will build research networks, explore complex and singular problems, enable self-forming expertise-driven team building that will be well-positioned for competitive research opportunities, and expose scientists, engineers, faculty and students to realistic research applications and perspectives, helping to ensure our nation's future strength and competitiveness in these critical fields.

Full details about ARL Open Campus can be found on the ARL website:

https://www.arl.army.mil /opencampus/

Related Programs at ARL:

Network Science (NS) Collaborative Technology Alliance (CTA). The objective of the NS CTA is to perform foundational research leading to a fundamental understanding of the interplay among the Social/Cognitive, Information, and Communication Networks (multi-genre) that are key components of a tactical network.

This research will lead to insights on how processes and parameters in one network affect and are affected by those in other networks; these in turn should enable us to predict and control the composite behavior of these complex interacting networks.

Research in the NS CTA is organized along four basic themes: (1) How -multi-genre networks behave over time (optimal design, group phenomena, large dynamic networks, prediction of network properties and structure, controllability of complex networks); (2) How information representation, discovery, and analytics contribute to distributed understanding and social influence; (3) Control of semantically-adaptive network behaviors so that the capacity of the composite network to deliver relevant information can be maximized using intrinsic, contextual, and semantic properties; and

(4) The impact of trust on distributed decision-making in the presence of human cognitive limitations and conflicting, incomplete, or malicious information.

Collaborations between researchers in the IoBT CRA and the NS CTA may be beneficial.

Cyber Security Collaborative Research Alliance (Cyber CRA). This CRA focuses on developing a fundamental understanding of cyber phenomena, including aspects of human attackers, cyber defenders, and end users, so that fundamental laws, theories, and theoretically grounded and empirically validated models can be applied to a broad range of Army domains, applications, and environments. Specifically, this basic research program is developing and advancing the state of the art of Cyber Security in three research areas: risk, detection, and agility. Intersecting with each of the three research areas is a cross cutting research issue in psychosocial effects. Collaborations between researchers in the IoBT CRA and the Cyber CRA may be beneficial.

Distributed Analytics & Information Science (DAIS) International Technology

Alliance (ITA). The objective of the DAIS ITA is to establish the fundamental underpinnings for enabling distributed, dynamic, secure coalition communication-information infrastructures that will enable the formation of ad-hoc coalition teams supported by distributed analytics to derive situational understanding. Key areas of research include: (1) Dynamic adaptation of secure, resilient context-aware information systems; (2) Distributed integration and exploitation of coalition data and information across heterogeneous information infrastructures; and (3) Derivation of situational understanding of complex situations by human users synergistically supported by machines. Collaborations between researchers in the IoBT CRA and the DAIS ITA may be beneficial.

Network Science Research Laboratory (NSRL). The NSRL is the first major Information Sciences Campaign laboratory space to be designed specifically to support the ARL Open Campus initiative. The NSRL is located at the Adelphi Laboratory Center, Adelphi, MD, and contains extensive space and equipment for collaborative activities in person or via remote access. It is built on an extensible infrastructure for real-time modeling of mobile network systems providing a controlled, repeatable emulation and simulation environment for the research, development and evaluation of network algorithms and protocols. Collaborations in the NSRL between researchers in the IoBT CRA may be beneficial.

A full listing of related ARL programs can be found on the ARL website.

3. CRA Programmatic Strategy

The CRA is intended to foster collaborative basic research (Budget Activity 1 - see definition below) involving the Consortium and the Government. ARL’s strategy is to continue exploiting research and expertise where it exists through the issuance of a single award through this Program Announcement (PA) to a Consortium of organizations that may include institutions of higher education and industrial and non-profit entities. The Consortium will work in collaboration with ARL scientists and engineers to advance the state-of-the-art in IoBT to meet the challenges of future Army operations. ARL and the Consortium selected for award will establish an Alliance that will conduct joint collaborative basic research addressing key scientific gaps and barriers critical to realizing dynamically composable, adaptive, goal-driven IoBTs. Additionally, other government agencies may participate in the CRA and contribute their technical expertise, personnel and facilities. A significant goal of this effort will be to create a critical mass of collaborating scientists and engineers focused on solving IoBT research challenges outlined within the scope of the CRA. This intellectual synergy is also expected to include sharing equipment, personnel and facilities to promote efficiency and enhance collaboration.

Based upon the gaps discussed in Section II.A.4 and the resources identified in Section II.A.7, the research and collaboration strategy developed by the Applicant should adopt a systematic approach to fundamental research focused on understanding IoBT-related phenomena so that techniques can be used to learn IoBTs models in complex environments and to uncover hidden insights and meaningful events and anomalies. This research should lead to an elucidation of fundamental laws, theories and theoretically grounded and empirically validated models that enable design of dynamic, adaptive, goal-driven IoBTs.

Applicants must carefully choose research topics to ensure a critical mass of researchers addressing the challenges proposed. Applicants are expected to apply relatively equal resources to each of the three Research Areas: 1) Discovery, Composition and Adaptation of Goal-Driven Heterogeneous IoBTs; 2) Autonomic IoBTs to Enable Intelligent Services;

and 3) Distributed Asynchronous Processing and Analytics of Things. Further, a portion (approximately 15%) of the research dedicated to each area must address the Cyber Physical Security Cross-Cutting Research Issue (CCRI). The CCRI resources are an integral part of the Research Area efforts.

It is the intent of this PA to solicit the most creative, innovative, and flexible approaches to the ultimate goal of generating and exploiting research to solve pressing research gaps and issues impacting both the military and commercial sectors. This PA seeks Whitepapers and Proposals from those who receive a subsequent invitation which will result in the award of a single cooperative agreement. In response to the PA, Applicants will be required to:

Define the strategy for implementing an approach which synergistically integrates the three Research Areas and the CCRI, and outlines the metrics by which success of the program is expected to be measured.

Scope and define the research, appropriate to the overall funding of the CRA, ensuring all elements of the proposed research are tightly integrated in a way that results of research in one area support and enhance the results in other areas.

Applicants should identify the most critical research issues and describe how the set of research efforts meet the goals of this program. Sufficient resources should be allocated to ensure enough critical mass to make fundamental progress.

Formulate a basic research program which clearly demonstrates innovative, detailed and substantive scientific plans to address each of the three Research Areas and the CCRI as discussed in Section II.A.4. The proposal should clearly articulate the Applicant’s vision for the area and the Applicant’s research goals for the program (two, five and ten year goals).

Present the experience, qualifications and availability of the scientific staff and the quality and relevance of research facilities.

Identify approaches to building collaborations within the Consortium and with ARL, which are essential to the success of the CRA.

Identify the overall management (business plan) and programmatic and administrative team with the expertise to achieve the stated research goals and to oversee and manage finances, reporting, data, meetings, reviews and intellectual property.

Providing the requirements above will furnish the structure for the desired comprehensive and cohesive outcome of the basic research performed under the CRA. The core basic research program will be initially funded under Budget Activity 1 (basic research) funding.

However, the CRA will also allow participation from other Government agencies and may result in additional Budget Activity 1 (basic research) funding as well as Budget Activity 2 (applied research) funding (see discussion of Enhanced Program below). Therefore, the research proposed and performed must comply with the definition for Budget Activity 1 or Budget Activity 2 funding (as appropriate) as outlined in the DoD Financial Management Regulation (FMR), Volume 2B, Chapter 5 (December 2016) as follows:

Budget Activity 1: Basic Research. Basic research is systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and of observable facts without specific applications towards processes or products in mind.

It includes all scientific study and experimentation directed toward increasing fundamental knowledge and understanding in those fields of the physical, engineering, environmental, and life sciences related to long-term national security needs. It is farsighted high payoff research that provides the basis for technological progress. Basic research may lead to: (a) subsequent applied research and advanced technology developments in Defense-related technologies, and (b) new and improved military functional capabilities in areas such as communications, detection, tracking, surveillance, propulsion, mobility, guidance and control, navigation, energy conversion, materials and structures, and personnel support. Program elements in this category involve pre-Milestone A efforts.

Budget Activity 2: Applied Research. Applied research is systematic study to understand the means to meet a recognized and specific need. It is a systematic expansion and application of knowledge to develop useful materials, devices, and systems or methods. It may be oriented, ultimately, toward the design, development, and improvement of prototypes and new processes to meet general mission area requirements. Applied research may translate promising basic research into solutions for broadly defined military needs, short of system development. This type of effort may vary from systematic mission-directed research beyond that in Budget Activity 1 to sophisticated breadboard hardware, study, programming and planning efforts that establish the initial feasibility and practicality of proposed solutions to technological challenges. It includes studies, investigations, and non-system specific technology efforts. The dominant characteristic is that applied research is directed toward general military needs with a view toward developing and evaluating the feasibility and practicality of proposed solutions and determining their parameters. Applied Research precedes system specific technology investigations or development. Program control of the Applied Research program element is normally exercised by general level of effort. Program elements in this category involve pre-Milestone B efforts, also known as Concept and Technology Development phase tasks, such as concept exploration efforts and paper studies of alternative concepts for meeting a mission need.

A successful research program will lay the scientific foundations for a theory of goal-driven IoBTs by combining new developments in theory, innovative extensions of existing theory, computationally efficient modeling techniques, empirically driven model development, and principled experimental validation. Research in each Research Area must not be stove-piped and it must inform and be informed by the developments in the other two Research Areas given the strong inter-dependencies between the three Research Areas.

4. CRA Research Strategy

a. Definitions, Scope, Rationale

For the purposes of this CRA, an Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is a set of interdependent and interconnected entities or “things” that can include: Sensors, Actuators, Devices (computers, weapons, vehicles, robots, human-wearables...), Infrastructure (networks, storage, processing), Analytics (on-node, in-network, centralized), Information sources & Open Source Intelligence, and Humans:

That are… Dynamically composed to meet multiple missions, tasks, or goals

And… Adapt in order to capture/process data, predict behaviors/activities, and effectuate the physical environment

And are likely to… operate autonomously and autonomically, i.e. properties include Self-Star characteristics (Self* = SELF organizing, configuring, adapting, maintaining, protecting)

Necessarily… Interacting with humans, environment, networks

In order… To enable predictive analytics that deliver intelligent command and control, and battlefield services

The Army IoBT domain will have the following characteristics:

Diverse IoBT missions, tasks, and goals. An Army IoBT will be specifically created and adapted to meet a mission, complete a task, or accomplish a goal. There will likely be many IoBTs operating simultaneously, possibly competing for IoBT resources. The possible tasks are diverse including such things as wide area persistent surveillance, tracking a dispersed group of humans and vehicles moving thought cluttered environment, monitoring cities for protests, disaster relief operations, or monitoring physiological and psychological state of soldiers. Tasks are not expected to start or end simultaneously, and new tasks may emerge as others are executed.

Need for rapid IoBT composition, deployment, and adaptability to changing missions/tasks. To be effective, goal-driven IoBTs must be composed and deployed rapidly, for example at a quickly-formed forward operating base. This includes identifying available things (blue, gray, red), composing to meet goals, and configuring and deploying as rapidly as possible. Once deployed, missions and tasks will be constantly changing, and new tasks may emerge, as conditions on the ground change, analysts/commanders change tactics, and as the fluid battlefield changes so the IoBT must adapt as well.

Highly dynamic, mobile, and resource-constrained environment. Many IoBTs will be forward-deployed and will consist of disadvantaged assets with limitations on energy, power, storage, bandwidth, infrastructure (fixed infrastructure may not be available), computing, and communications. IoBTs must be able to operate with these severe constraints and often need to support tasks with limited time availability.

Extreme heterogeneity. The variety of things available to an IoBT is immense.

In addition to the various classes of things described above, IoBTs will contain a mixture of entities that include military devices controlled by the military, adversarial devices that we do not control or partially control, or commercial and open source entities. Coexistence and co-deployment of commercial Internet of Things (IoT) devices and networks with purposefully built, certified, and carefully controlled military devices and networks will be required. These things will have a wide variety of security, provenance, and capabilities that must be accommodated and will need to exploit very capable devices and simple disposable devices.

Varying scale. IoBTs will be deployed in a wide variety of places and domains, usually in contested environments. On one extreme is the highly dense and cluttered mega-city environment and on the other extreme sparse terrain with limited entities and gaps in sensor coverage and networks.

Contested and adversarial environments. Many IoBTs will be forward deployed with limited physical security and will include entities in the IoBT that are owned and controlled by the adversary. It must be assumed that adversaries are already on the IoBT network and that the IoBT must be protected from sophisticated and persistent threats. Cyber/information security measures must be taken to protect IoBTs and analytics must be able to deal with conflicting and deceptive data, and identify adversarial activity.

Some of the technical challenges for IoBTs include:

Abstractions, formalisms, and models for constructing and reasoning about dynamic composition of heterogeneous systems with complex and dynamic dependencies

Composing and connecting sets of entities (an IoBT) from the vast array of possibilities to meet multiple (conflicting) goals

Adapting an IoBT to sparse entities (which may require augmentation) and dense entities (like in megacities)

Establish theoretical foundations for robust self-learning and optimization in distributed IoBTs

Accommodating safety critical functions

Real time synchronization and coordination for real-time analysis

Adapting to highly dynamic resource availability (sensing, computing, bandwidth and connectivity)

The possible research challenges for IoBT are extensive and the resources available are not adequate to address them all. It is important that the Applicant identify the most critical research issues that the CRA should focus on to advance the state-of-the-art in IoBTs.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are rapidly being developed by the commercial sector and it is imperative that the Army exploit these future advances whenever possible, however this CRA should address the gaps that will not be addressed by the commercial sector. It is unlikely that the following lines of research would be productive for the purposes of this CRA:

Development of standards for IoT devices and protocols

Low power communications or novel communications modalities or protocols

Design, development and analysis of sensors or RFIDs

Standalone security mechanisms that are not studied jointly with other CRA research efforts

Approaches limited to current or static IoT environments

b. Overview of Research Areas (RAs) and Cross Cutting Research Issue (CCRI)

To achieve the CRA’s vision, a different approach to current research models for the commercial Internet of Things, where areas proceed independently along commercial/industrial stovepipes, is imperative. The three Research Areas (RA) and Cross Cutting Research Issue (CCRI) are:

RA1: Discovery, Composition and Adaptation of Goal-Driven Heterogeneous IoBTs: Novel mathematical theories and scientific insights leading to scalable composition and management of heterogeneous IoBTs enabling secure information sharing to meet multiple dynamic mission goals.

RA2: Autonomic IoBTs to Enable Intelligent Services: Theoretical foundations, models, and methods of autonomic complex systems that deliver adaptive cyber-physical capabilities and services necessary to enable effective command and control across military (blue), adversary (red), and civilian (gray) domains.

RA3: Distributed Asynchronous Processing and Analytics of Things: Scientific principles, theories, and methods and predictive processing, analytics, and anomaly detection of broadly heterogeneous and varied data that may be unknown combinations of sparse and voluminous; centralized and distributed; and trusted and suspect for the purposes of augmenting goal-driven decision-making.

CCRI: Cyber-Physical Security: Theoretical and pragmatic cross-cutting methods that address the challenges of the above research areas, while enriching the resiliency of the IoBT, such that it can be hardened against tampering and adversarial compromise, continue operating under attacks, and provide bounded guarantees of performance.

Research proposed in each area should be substantially different than commercial Internet of Things approaches and they must fit coherently together. Research should not be stove-piped as there are significant inter-dependencies between the RAs and the CCRI. As examples, analytics (RA3) needs/results impact goals (RA1) which require IoBT adaptation (RA2); IoBTs must adapt to changing needs/goals and to meet new service requirements; analytics results impact the goals and autonomic behaviors; and conflicting information may trigger IoBT adaptation to detect anomalous behaviors versus faults.

The research goals to be addressed by the Applicant in each of the Research Areas and the CCRI are discussed in the following sections. Research in each RA must be performed in the context and constraints of the complementary research in the other RAs. Cross cutting research that spans the three RAs should lead to insights into the cyber-physical security aspects of IoBTs. Joint research in the RAs and CCRI should lead to deep, persistent, and meaningful collaboration among the Alliance and should harmonize vocabularies, ontologies, metrics, structures, and processes to build understanding of how to learn and devise complex models of IoBT goals, networks, information, and analytics to enable intelligent command and control and battlefield services.

RA1: Discovery, Composition, and Adaptation of Goal-Driven, Heterogeneous IoBTs

The battlefield of the future will be densely populated by a variety of ‘things’, comprising a heterogeneous mixture of sensors, actuators, devices, information sources, analytics, humans, and infrastructure, with varying ‘intelligence’ and capabilities, and constraints on energy, power, computing and communications bandwidth. The number of nodes in a future Army brigade IoBT might be several orders of magnitude greater than today. In such a scenario, the brigade may not own or fully control all the things it uses. For example, a brigade may find it advantageous to make use of “things” that it does not own, e.g., local civilian IoT, or even an adversary’s IoT in a megacity operation. This heterogeneous mixture of blue, gray and red nodes is a unique differentiator from commercial IoTs.

Multiple missions with differing goals will need to make use of resources in the IoBT.

These missions will be asynchronous and goals may change dynamically. The massive scale might be advantageous in terms of redundancy and availability; but the massive scale, coupled with the extreme heterogeneity and dynamics, also brings several challenges that will require new theoretical results, models, concepts and technical approaches.

New concepts and approaches will be needed to facilitate discovery, characterization and tracking of relevant, available but potentially hidden, and useful things (which includes their capabilities), dynamically in time and space. The Army may use IoTs that it does not own or directly control (e.g., a local IoT or an adversary’s IoT in a megacity operation), and in such a scenario behaviors and characteristics of the IoT will have to be learned and updated automatically and dynamically on the fly. Behaviors and intents of humans (friendly warfighters, adversaries, and neutral civilians) will also have to be dynamically detected, identified, characterized and accounted for as part of IoBT’s operation.

Automated approaches for continuous allocation and reconfiguration of sensing, processing, communications, and sense-making assets must be designed. Information sensing, processing, and sharing strategies and policies (who senses what, what is processed where, who talks to whom, when, about what, and how long) will have to be automatically designed and modified dynamically. The high complexity, scale and dynamics of the IoBT leads to challenges in communications between things.