Air force 16. 1 Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Proposal Submission Instructions

REFERENCES:

1. IEEE 802.11.

2. AIR FORCE INSTRUCTION 63-125 NUCLEAR CERTIFICATION PROGRAM.

3. AIR FORCE INSTRUCTION 91-101 AIR FORCE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SURETY PROGRAM.

KEYWORDS: electronic, electronic warfare, NC3, WSC2, command and control, radio, antenna

AF161-056

TITLE: Fusion of Multiple Motion Information Sources

TECHNOLOGY AREA(S): Information Systems

OBJECTIVE: Assist intelligence analysts gain understanding of individuals and networks, focused on the activity and transactions associated with an entity, population, or area of interest, by fusion of multiple motion information sources.

DESCRIPTION: Intelligence analysts often are overwhelmed with vast amounts of different data from multiple sources. The information overload hampers their efforts to do effective and timely intel analysis, resulting in delays of critical decisions at higher levels. This in turn leads to undesirable consequences such as adversaries getting away, friendly troops not getting air support on time, or worse, getting injured or killed.

Activity-based intelligence (ABI) offers a likely solution to this problem, but tools are needed for its effective use. ABI is a discipline of intelligence where analysis and subsequent collection are focused on the activity and transactions associated with an entity, population, or area of interest. New sensors that provide persistent coverage over large areas enable the capability to continuously observe motion of both dismounts and vehicles. But the intent of ABI derived from motion data goes beyond simply knowing movement; the objective is to infer and determine the activities and transactions of individuals and networks, including patterns of life.

ABI requires a shift from the current focus on tracks that arrive and depart from a facility or location (e.g., capabilities such as trip wires and density plotting), to a focus on the underlying activities, relationships, and inferring what is in progress or about to happen. Additionally, ABI goes beyond single data sources, by integrating knowledge from a wide facet of data providers and sensors.

However, there numerous challenges to the fusion of multiple sensors (e.g., ground moving target indicator, full-motion video, and wide-area motion imagery) and multiple intelligence sources (communication intelligence, measurement and signals intelligence, open source intelligence, and human intelligence).

ABI tools are needed to gather, fuse, and filter intel data sources; to analyze, integrate, and characterize the data; to alert analysts about activities and transactions of interest; and to generate requests for information and recommendations for additional data sources. An essential capability required is to extract objects of interest from full-motion video on the fly, search/retrieve likenesses from unstructured archives, and correlate the objects with all-source data in near-real time.

Integration and fusion of multiple sources will require technologies that manage resources and data (including historical and forensic data), combine disparate sources, identify dynamic and evolving patterns, activities, and transactions, aid the analysts with the appropriate amount of automation, and request needed data and information, in both near real time and forensic applications. The focus of these tools is to develop understanding of human activity and the underlying intent of individuals and networks.

PHASE I: Investigate existing technologies and methods that support ABI, with a focus on multiple source fusion and integration. Develop and apply activity detection and characterization methodologies for a defined set of data and products. Evaluate the performance and viability of these methods using realistic data sets (simulated or collected) (demonstrate feasibility).

PHASE II: Implement algorithm prototypes in a realistic environment that enables thorough testing of algorithms. Incorporate applications to support testing, e.g., operator displays, decision support systems. Demonstrate and validate algorithm(s) effectiveness. Deliver an algorithm description document, engineering code and test cases. Explore and document other potential methodologies identified in Ph I.

PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS: Develop and mature the technology for use within the Intelligence Community and Homeland Security.

REFERENCES:

1. Air Strike Targets Terrorist Safe Haven in Husaybah, www.defenselink.mil/.

2. Activity Based Intelligence, Technology Track GEOINT 2010, Nov 2010.

3. GMTI-tracking and information fusion for ground surveillance, Koch, W. FGANFKIE,Wachtberg, Germany Journal: Proceedings of the SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering Conference Title: Proc. SPIE - Int. Soc. Opt. Eng. (USA) vol.4473 p.381-925.

KEYWORDS: activity, event detection, GMTI, event processing, multi-source fusion, ABI

AF161-057

TITLE: Secure and Survivable Antennas for Communication in a Nuclear Environment

TECHNOLOGY AREA(S): Nuclear Technology

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120-130, which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services, including export of sensitive technical data, or the Export Administration Regulation (EAR), 15 CFR Parts 730-774, which controls dual use items. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals (FNs), their country(ies) of origin, the type of visa or work permit possessed, and the statement of work (SOW) tasks intended for accomplishment by the FN(s) in accordance with section 5.4.c.(8) of the solicitation and within the AF Component-specific instructions. Offerors are advised foreign nationals proposed to perform on this topic may be restricted due to the technical data under US Export Control Laws. Please direct questions to the AF SBIR/STTR Contracting Officer, Ms. Gail Nyikon, gail.nyikon@us.af.mil.

OBJECTIVE: Design, simulate, and develop prototype of a secure and survivable antenna for communication in a nuclear environment providing coverage over frequency bands of interest.

DESCRIPTION: To ensure the survivability of our nation in the event of a catastrophic nuclear attack, critical nuclear command, control and communication (NC3) systems must be unhindered by the resulting environment and able to survive the primary effects of a nuclear blast. Nuclear hardened and survivable antennas for future geosynchronous V and W-Band satellite communications systems are desired to allow unimpeded and uninterrupted NC3 in pre-, trans-, and post-nuclear attack environments. Additionally, these nuclear hardened and survivable antennas shall be adaptable to local RF communications. The antennas should meet nuclear requirements and incorporate LPD/LPE/LPI/LPJ (Low Probability of Detection/Exploitation/Interception/Jamming). Throughout this effort, a multitude of concepts are expected to be explored and subsequently narrowed down to a few top contenders, which should be modeled to examine survivability in various environments and against various nuclear effects. The top concept should then enter the design phase and a prototype should be developed and tested to ensure secure and survivable communications in a nuclear environment.

PHASE I: Phase I would entail the identification and evaluation of concepts for nuclear secure and survivable antennas, analysis and modeling of top concepts, and would provide a written plan for development of the top concept based on modeling results.

PHASE II: Phase II would entail the development and testing of the prototype antenna. Deliverables would include the design specifications, testing results, and recommendations for improvement should the design turn out to be less effective than expected.

PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS: Commercial Application: Commercial space vehicle communications.

REFERENCES:

1. Pratt, T., Bostian, C., Allnutt, J., Satellite Communications, 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2003.

2. De Fina, S., Ruggieri, M., Bosisio, A.V.,"Exploitation of the W-band for high capacity satellite communications," IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Vol. 39, Issue 1, pp. 82 93, 2003.

3. Perrotta, G., Jebril, A., Ruggieri, M.,"Early Experiments with W-band Satellite Links," 2006 IEEE Aerospace Conference, pp. 11, 2006.

4. “The Nuclear Matters Handbook”, Appendix G, Nuclear Survivability. http://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/nm_book_5_11/appendix_G.htm.

5. AIR FORCE INSTRUCTION 63-125 NUCLEAR CERTIFICATION PROGRAM and AIR FORCE INSTRUCTION 91-101 AIR FORCE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SURETY PROGRAM.

KEYWORDS: NC3, secure, survivable, communications, nuclear, AEHF, V-Band, W-Band

TECHNOLOGY AREA(S): Air Platform

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120-130, which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services, including export of sensitive technical data, or the Export Administration Regulation (EAR), 15 CFR Parts 730-774, which controls dual use items. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals (FNs), their country(ies) of origin, the type of visa or work permit possessed, and the statement of work (SOW) tasks intended for accomplishment by the FN(s) in accordance with section 5.4.c.(8) of the solicitation and within the AF Component-specific instructions. Offerors are advised foreign nationals proposed to perform on this topic may be restricted due to the technical data under US Export Control Laws. Please direct questions to the AF SBIR/STTR Contracting Officer, Ms. Gail Nyikon, gail.nyikon@us.af.mil.

OBJECTIVE: Develop a modular, secure, and affordable solution for Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) for Air Force platforms.

DESCRIPTION: NextGen is an umbrella term for the ongoing transformation of the National Airspace System (NAS). At its most basic level, NextGen represents a transition from a ground-based radar system of air traffic control to a satellite-based system of air traffic management. At the heart of NextGen is Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B). ADS-B is a surveillance technology for tracking aircraft. ADS-B enhances safety by making an aircraft visible, real-time, to ATC and to other appropriately equipped ADS-B aircraft with position, velocity, and identification data transmissions. ADS-B Out enables transponders to broadcast aircraft position upon interrogation and provides accurate positional information to the ground and to aircraft equipped with ADS-B In terminals. The FAA has mandated ADS-B Out in all U.S. airspace where transponders are currently required by January 1, 2020, and the system must meet strict latency and accuracy requirements (Ref 1).

While ADS-B will play an essential role in the future of air traffic control, the inherent lack of security measures in the ADS-B protocol is a reason for concern. The problem has recently been widely reported in the press and at hacker conventions. Academic researchers, too, proved the ease of compromising the security of ADS-B with current off-the-shelf hard- and software (Ref 2). It has also been estimated that it will cost billions of dollars to retrofit all DoD aircraft with ADS-B technology. Given these numbers and the looming ADS-B Out FY 2020 mandate, it is readily apparent that there is a need for a practical, secure and affordable solution to transitioning NextGen technology into the DoD/civilian fleet of aircraft.

The expected results of this effort include an enterprise level strategy and approach to satisfying air domain equipage mandates in new modular ways. The goal is to not only achieve mandates as prescribed by both combat and civil authorities, but to also look at modular equipage as a method to dramatically increase capability, improve safety, and slash costs.

PHASE I: Design a laboratory scale concept for a modular, secure, and affordable solution for ADS-B integration (ADS-B Out and ADS-B In) on Air Force platforms. Develop a test plan for assessing modularity, level of security, and affordability of developed solution.

PHASE II: Construct the ADS-B system developed in Phase I and demonstrate that the developed solution meets all FAA criteria for ADS-B Out. Demonstration will be accomplished using real flight testing with the ADS-B Out signal being received by a certified FAA ADS-B ground station.

PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS: A modular, secure, and affordable solution for ADS-B that meets FAA guidelines and certification requirements for ADS-B. This dual-use technology applies to both military and commercial aircraft concerned with meeting the ADS-B mandate.

REFERENCES:

1. AC 20-165A - Airworthiness Approval of Automatic Dependent Surveillance--Broadcast

2. Strohmeier, M., Lenders, V., & Ivan Martinovic, I. (2014). On the Security of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Protocol. Retrieved June 1, 2015, from http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.3664.pdf.

KEYWORDS: 1090 ES, air traffic control, Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, ADS-B, NextGen, situational awareness, Universal Access Transceiver, UAT

AF161-059

TITLE: Event Recognition for Space Situational Awareness

TECHNOLOGY AREA(S): Information Systems

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120-130, which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services, including export of sensitive technical data, or the Export Administration Regulation (EAR), 15 CFR Parts 730-774, which controls dual use items. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals (FNs), their country(ies) of origin, the type of visa or work permit possessed, and the statement of work (SOW) tasks intended for accomplishment by the FN(s) in accordance with section 5.4.c.(8) of the solicitation and within the AF Component-specific instructions. Offerors are advised foreign nationals proposed to perform on this topic may be restricted due to the technical data under US Export Control Laws. Please direct questions to the AF SBIR/STTR Contracting Officer, Ms. Gail Nyikon, gail.nyikon@us.af.mil.

OBJECTIVE: Develop means and methods in leveraging the available multi-INT data to understand currently evolving space situations as a means to provide indications and warnings (I&W) left of the event.

DESCRIPTION: Space situational awareness (SSA) involves the knowledge and understanding of the resident space object population with an emphasis on leveraging this knowledge to protect U.S. space-borne assets. To this point, SSA has focused on two specific threads, namely the characterization of space objects and the identification of specific events of interest. Unfortunately, for many space-based activities, the identification of specific, discernably threatening events may occur too late to allow for appropriate responses to be initiated. One means to combat this issue to leverage the available multi-INT data to understand currently evolving situations in space as a means to provide indications and warnings (I&W) left of these singular events. The understanding of situations as opposed to events represents a paradigm shift in current SSA operations. Because space situations are ever evolving, approaches should leverage robust technologies, such as extensible ontologies, to incorporate derived or newly observed information into the understanding. Further, since SSA data is limited in quantity, there is a requirement to leverage and fuse multi-source, multi-INT data as part of a flexible architecture. The resulting technology will enable advanced SSA by allowing a fuller understanding of the space operational picture and supporting I&W to provide tactical protection of U.S. space assets.

Developing such capabilities requires addressing several challenges including:

PHASE I: Design an event recognition SSA prototype system that leverages/fuses multi-source, multi-INT data as part of a flexible architecture. The event recognition SSA design should be formed with the above objective in mind.

PHASE II: Development of a prototype system that implements the Phase I design, and demonstrates/validates the prototypes performance using a representative multi-INT dataset.

PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS: The resulting system will support SSA, which has both military and commercial applicability.

REFERENCES:

1. B. Rhodes, et al., “Anomaly Detection and Behavior Prediction: Higher-Level Fusion Based on Computational Neuroscientific Principles,” in Sensor and Data Fusion, pp 490, February 2009.

2. C. L. Davis, “The Systems Integration of Autonomous Behavior Analysis to Create a Maritime Smart Environment for the Enhancement of Maritime Domain Awareness.” Master’s Thesis, Naval, Post Graduate School.

3. E. Blasch and S. Isreal, "Situation/Threat Context Assessment." July 2015, 18th International Conference on Information Fusion, Washington DC.

4. R. Fujimaki, “An Approach to Spacecraft Anomaly Detection Using Kernel Feature Space,” Proc. PAKDD-2005: Ninth Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

KEYWORDS: pattern learning, anomaly detection, machine learning, space situational awareness, information fusion, SSA

TECHNOLOGY AREA(S): Information Systems

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120-130, which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services, including export of sensitive technical data, or the Export Administration Regulation (EAR), 15 CFR Parts 730-774, which controls dual use items. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals (FNs), their country(ies) of origin, the type of visa or work permit possessed, and the statement of work (SOW) tasks intended for accomplishment by the FN(s) in accordance with section 5.4.c.(8) of the solicitation and within the AF Component-specific instructions. Offerors are advised foreign nationals proposed to perform on this topic may be restricted due to the technical data under US Export Control Laws. Please direct questions to the AF SBIR/STTR Contracting Officer, Ms. Gail Nyikon, gail.nyikon@us.af.mil.

OBJECTIVE: This topic seeks to apply the concepts of anti-fragility[1] to the domain of software for the purposes of survival and recovery during and after a system compromise.

DESCRIPTION: Software bugs, however minor, can often result in cascading system failures regardless of the scale of the overall system.[2] The common approach taken by software development teams and quality assurance engineers is to find and eliminate as many bugs as possible within the enterprise scale software systems they are building.[2] The anti-fragility approaches to software development would augment the current mindset of simply attempting to eliminate errors during development to one of finding a means to learn and improve from errors during operation. By learning and improving from errors, software is able to become more resilient over time due to the inevitable occurrences of errors in production systems running in enterprise environments.

There is a need to explore the application of the anti-fragility approach as applied to software and the software engineering process.[2] Anti-fragility has the potential to result in software which is significantly more resilient in the face of compromise or when faced with system errors and bad data. Proposers should first consider the application of anti-fragility to software systems and the constraints and challenges of such a system. Methods for randomly injecting faults and errors should also be pursued to inject and induce systems errors[2,3] into mission critical systems or from virtualized servers. The application of antifragility concepts should be explored from the perspective of virtualized hosts to benefit from the existing resiliency technologies within the cloud architecture.

Consideration will be given to solutions that 1) can learn, adapt, and recover in a stronger state as a result of software errors; 2) can function within the constraints of enterprise network without major changes to existing infrastructure; and 3) result in persistent improvements and increased resiliency as errors are encountered.

PHASE I: Research and design the overall application of antifragility to software and the software development process. Define the types of data that can be collected for metrics and concepts for antifragility operations. Ideally at the end of Phase I performers will be able to provide a proof-of-concept demonstration.

PHASE II: Develop the capability and test against representative enterprise networks and environments.

PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS: Work with the DoD to demonstrate that the prototype developed during Phase II can also be applied to DoD systems and software. Further demonstrate and deploy the capability within diverse environments.

REFERENCES:

1. Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder (Vol. 3). Random House Incorporated.

2. Monperrus, M. (2014). Principles of Antifragile Software. arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.3056.

3. The Netflix Simian Army, http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html.

KEYWORDS: anti-fragility, software systems, virtualization, resilient systems

AF161-061

TITLE: Object Based Production (OBP) for Satellite Characterization

TECHNOLOGY AREA(S): Information Systems

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120-130, which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services, including export of sensitive technical data, or the Export Administration Regulation (EAR), 15 CFR Parts 730-774, which controls dual use items. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals (FNs), their country(ies) of origin, the type of visa or work permit possessed, and the statement of work (SOW) tasks intended for accomplishment by the FN(s) in accordance with section 5.4.c.(8) of the solicitation and within the AF Component-specific instructions. Offerors are advised foreign nationals proposed to perform on this topic may be restricted due to the technical data under US Export Control Laws. Please direct questions to the AF SBIR/STTR Contracting Officer, Ms. Gail Nyikon, gail.nyikon@us.af.mil.