Metron to develop maritime counter-surveillance planning approach

DARPA Strategic Technology Office (STO) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)

Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-13-29

Notice Type: Award

Contract Award Date: January 16, 2015

Contract Award Number: HR0011-15-C-0044

Contract Award Dollar Amount: $455,080

Contract Line Item Number: 0001 and 0002

Contractor Awarded Name: Metron, Inc.

Contractor Awarded DUNS: 107939233

Contractor Awarded Address: 1818 Library Street; Suite 600; Reston, Virginia 20190

Synopsis: Added: Jan 16, 2015 11:11 am

The contractor will offer an innovative approach for planning maritime counter-surveillance operations based on an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) framework. 

About Planning Maritime Counter-Surveillance Operations

NWC_Autumn 2013 Review. - Maritime-Deception-and-Concealment--Concepts

The post–Cold War interlude during which U.S. maritime access to and within overseas regions of grand-strategic importance faced few challenges was a historical anomaly Accordingly, in January 2012 the Department of Defense (DOD) formally recognized in its Joint operational access concept (JoaC) [JOAC_Jan 2012_Signed.pdf] document that this pause is ending and that joint capability requirements must be revisited. The JoaC establishes benchmarks for developing the doctrine, training priorities, warfare systems and matériel, organizational structures, and other measures necessary to overcome advanced maritime-denial capabilities across all warfare domains.

Woven throughout the JoaC is the need to disrupt or neutralize the theater-wide surveillance and reconnaissance networks that strategic competitors are developing to provide their maritime-denial forces with tactically actionable targeting cues. Indeed, China’s and (to a much lesser extent)
Iran’s deployments of dense, layered, and networked capabilities over the past decade represent continuity with the millennia-old struggles between offense and defense, as well as between localized area control and denial.

About ADP

Information Acquisition and Representation Methods for Real-Time Asset Management

Principal Investigator: Warren B. Powell

Princeton University

Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering

Princeton, NJ 08544

powell@princeton.edu

Our research over the last six years has focused on the modeling and solution of complex resource allocation problems, which resulted in the integration of math programming within the emerging field of approximate dynamic programming, summarized in




Warren B. Powell, Approximate Dynamic Programming: Solving the curses of dimensionality, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 2007.


These techniques allow us to address problems which involve high-dimensional decision vectors (which routinely arise in resource allocation problems) under various forms of uncertainty. These  techniques have proven themselves in a number of major project with civilian transportation  companies (with implemented software), and several demonstration projects on air force logistics  problems.


APPROXIMATE DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING: LESSONS FROM THE FIELD - 022.pdf

NRL What you should know about ADP_Dec162008.pdf