By providing situational awareness and stress testing, RSDN will enable the Department of Defense and commercial partners to appropriately address systemic risk in procurement and acquisition and to identify and mitigate systemic fragilities before they cause disruptions. The RSDN program will achieve these capabilities by developing a data integration platform and analytical toolkit for supply and-demand networks. RSDN will use data on supplies of pharmaceuticals, military metals, and military food to implement these novel capabilities in realistic environments and to facilitate transition to operational partners. RSDN’s capstone will be a stress testing framework to check for strategic vulnerabilities and explore possible mitigations.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals in the following areas of interest: network maps of supply chains, stress testing and scenario design for supply chains as networked systems, natural language processing and computational modeling of procurement contracts, legal entity identification and resolution, threat/vulnerability modeling and mitigation/resilience policy development for procurement networks. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.
Deadlines:
o Abstract Due Date and Time: March 15, 2022, 12:00pm (ET)
o Proposal Due Date and Time: April 25, 2022, 12:00pm (ET)
- TA1 – Data curation and reconciliation
- TA2 – SDN augmentation and analysis
- TA3 – SDN stress-testing and fragility-mitigation simulator
While a proposing organization may submit separate proposals to any or all of the three technical areas, each organization will be selected for award for, at most, one single technical area. Proposers cannot be selected for any portion of the other technical areas, whether as a prime, subcontractor, or in any other capacity from an organizational level. This is to avoid potential OCI situations between the technical areas, to incorporate diverse input on APIs, and to ensure objective test and evaluation results. For organizations submitting proposals to multiple technical areas, the decision as to which proposal to consider for award is at the discretion of the Government.
The Government intends to conduct RSDN primarily at the unclassified level. However, aspects of TA1 and TA3 may involve classified information. At the time of proposal submission, all proposers wishing to submit proposals under TA1 and TA3 must have at least one person with a Top Secret clearance, preferably the Principal Investigator (PI). Proposers to TA2 are not required to hold or obtain security clearances. However, TA2 proposers who wish to have access to classified data and evaluation results for their applications must have at least one person with a Top Secret clearance.