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Month: March 2016

New Award: MySidewalk™ Phase II

Department of Transportation Selects KBSI to Develop Mobile Application to Help Inventory and Assess Sidewalks

March 7, 2016 – KBSI has been selected by Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center of the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop a mobile application for the collection and assessment of the U.S. sidewalk inventory.

Under the terms of the Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract, KBSI will utilize recent advances in social networks, crowd sourcing, mobile data collection methods, and data mining techniques to provide integrated sidewalk datasets for analysis.  The software solution, a mobile application called MySidewalk™, will facilitate the collection of sidewalk inventories and support directed insight decision making.

Built with open architectures and component technologies, MySidewalk™ will be developed with significant inputs from our partners, City of College Station, TX and Texas Transportation Institute making the solution amenable to a wide variety of public works crowd source collection efforts as well as other public entities such as healthcare, entertainment, education management work areas.

 

Success Story: An Intelligent Framework for Systems Interactions

In a push to improve the interoperability of the complex systems that support joint-service and multinational operations–the ability for these systems to interact and share data–the Department of Defense created the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF).  The framework uses an architecture data model and repository system to establish a common approach and backbone for DoD architecture description development, presentation, and integration.

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Success Story: Advanced Data Utilization Discovery

Collaboration is a hallmark of efficient, large-scale enterprises—collaboration at the basic level, among offices and employees and, equally important, collaboration among the systems of computer technologies that share enterprise data and information.  Like employees, these technologies must communicate and must be able to grow and adapt with the developing needs of the enterprise.  Enterprises like the Air Force and Department of Defense, who use large and complex computer systems to network an array of technologies—systems and technologies that are perpetually undergoing development—have a particular need for level of collaboration.  KBSI’s Adaptive Toolkit for Pattern Discovery (ATPD) initiative, funded by the U.S. Air Force, developed technology that helps the DoD more effectively share knowledge and information among their elaborate computer systems.

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Success Story: Biovigilance Reporting, Analysis, & Tracking

Most of the world’s industrialized nations have a comprehensive, national level biovigilance system that tracks events relating to blood transfusions and cell, tissue, and organ transplants, significantly improving the safety of these procedures.  The U.S., however, currently lacks such a biovigilance system to track and analyze routine blood and blood product related procedures.  In addition, in light of the current emphasis on national security, there is a critical need to analyze, in real-time, incidents of disease or safety issues to determine key performance metrics and trends, and to determine if the presence of these trends signal random events, possible outbreaks, or terrorist acts.

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Mixed-Mode Simulation-based Executable Architectures (MiMoSEA)

The MiMoSEA technology provides a methodology for generating and executing mixed-mode simulations for quantitative assessments of architectural frameworks.  It supports the entire analytic process from consistency checking of multiple system architectures to generating the requisite simulation and emulation models.

Today’s approaches to national defense are becoming more and more “capabilities”-centric.  This focus necessitates the ability to rapidly realize systems that are formed as collections of interoperating systems:  i.e., system-of-systems (SOS).  Each component system of an SOS is a complex hybrid of elements that include information, computation, mechanical, and human elements.  While information and computation elements of these systems-of-systems are the key functionality providers, the mechanical and human components ultimately deliver the punch.  As a consequence, the system architectures themselves should enable capabilities assessment:  these architectures should be directly usable for the quantitative assessment of interoperability or performance.

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Louisiana Center for Manufacturing Sciences (LCMS)

The LCMS initiative studied measures for improving production planning in the U.S. shipbuilding industry.  This study involved a comprehensive survey of current production practices in Tier 1 and Tier 2 shipyards and development of a TO-BE production planning environment for these shipyards.

KBSI was awarded a contract by the Louisiana Center for Manufacturing Sciences (LCMS) to study measures for improving production planning in the U.S. shipbuilding industry.  The study involved a comprehensive survey of current production planning practices in Tier 1 and Tier 2 shipyards, development of a TO-BE production planning environment for these shipyards, and development of a roadmap for implementing and achieving the TO-BE vision.

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Common Parts Catalog (CPC™)

The CPC™ initiative developed a standardized process and methodology for product characteristics/data modeling that allows Tier 2 shipyards to represent and communicate part information without ambiguity or redundancy.

A common problem in the shipbuilding industry is the lack of standardization in parts catalogs; in other words, the industry lacks a standardized process or methodology for product characteristics/data modeling that would allow them to represent and communicate part information without ambiguity or redundancy.  For individual organizations, this void results in large, unwieldy, and unorganized catalog systems that make it difficult to search for and re-use parts.  A typical second tier shipyard has a parts catalog with at least three to four times the number of parts currently in use by the enterprise.  Over time, when existing parts cannot easily be located, duplicate parts with new part numbers are created, perpetuating and exacerbating the cataloging problems.

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Facility Engineering Work Products System (FEWPS)

In the FEWPS initiative, KBSI leveraged the eTEAM solution for life cycle product management to create a system for tracking and managing requests in the development of facility engineering work products.

The process of developing complex systems or products typically requires participation from multiple specialties and organizations:  domain stakeholders, technology engineers, modeling and simulation analysts, system engineers, and managers.  Managing this development, because of the inherently complex, long-term, and multi-organizational nature of the work, is a challenging proposition that involves a number of facets and tasks:  request instantiation, disposition, and monitoring; generating and submitting a requirements package; tracking the outcomes of submissions; monitoring the status of outcomes; and generating reports, budgeting, and prioritization.  These operations currently tend to be performed manually and, as a consequence, are labor intensive and prone to errors.  There is no collaborative working environment and no centralized access to data.

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Parasitic Power Pack (P3)

KBSI is developing an innovative power pack for remotely deployed buoys.  The buoys enable communication, via a distributed sensor network, among the Navy’s underwater assets and assets above water.  The P3 technology uses wave power rather than batteries to power the buoy sensors.

The U.S. Navy and commercial oceanographic sensor manufacturers are building a distributed at sea communications network capability that will enable communications among various platforms such as Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and even other oceanographic sensors.  By coupling the undersea communications network with the sea mainstream Global Information Grid (GIG) communications infrastructure, the distributed network hopes to enable end-to-end connectivity among surface, air, shore, undersea platforms, and undersea sensors.  The goal of this network is to multiply the capabilities of existing platforms by enabling two-way communication both below and above the water and, in effect, enabling ultimate Network Centric Warfare (NCW) capabilities.

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