The U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) is seeking informed views of the opportunities and challenges to the development, deployment, operation and use of increased automation of the surface transportation system, including vehicles, drivers, users, road-based infrastructure, information systems and applications for the purpose of developing a U.S. DOT multimodal research plan for automation.

This is an area of great interest to the public, which may have significant impacts on many societal issues such as driving safety, personal mobility, energy consumption, operating efficiency, environmental impact, and land use. The focus for this RFI is to learn the views of government, industry, academia, and the American public with regard to:

• Roles of local, state, and federal governments in policy formation
• Technical challenges
• Human factors issues
• Institutional issues
• Legal issues associated with increased automation

Input to this RFI will assist the U.S. DOT to:

• Identify, categorize, and prioritize key research challenges
• Identify and begin quantifying anticipated societal costs and benefits
• Learn about current and planned research activities among private and public research groups
• Gain insight into commercial trends and market developments
• Understand opportunities that may be created for public-private partnerships and financing
• Organize the U.S. DOT research plan temporally, according to near-, mid-, and long-term priorities that reflect the time-sensitive aspects of evolving automation capabilities and market demands
• Identify appropriate areas for policy formation that can help to accelerate beneficial developments, reduce or eliminate public exposure to risk, and reduce the development and operation costs associated with automation

The RFI can be found on FedBizOps and here:  https://www.fbo.gov/spg/DOT/RITA/VNTSC/DTRT57-13-S-PNOTC/listing.html.  Responses are due by 12:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, Tuesday 23 April 2013, and shall be sent electronically to the Contracting Specialist, Michael Rigby, michael.rigby@dot.gov.  The USDOT extended the deadline for responses to the automation RFI until Tuesday 23 April at 12 noon.  https://www.fbo.gov/spg/DOT/RITA/VNTSC/DTRT57-13-S-PNOTC/listing.html.  

Many responses and questions have already been received.  One of the questions that has been raised merits direct response:  You do not need to respond to all of the RFI questions.  You may respond to as many (or as few) of the questions as you want.  Your response can be as long or as short as you choose.  And, if there is an issue or area that you think is germane to the issue, but the RFI doesn’t directly ask the question you have in mind, please write to that issue.

U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy

Request for Information (RFI) DE-FOA-0000673
on
Advanced Technologies for Robust Control of Energy Storage

OBJECTIVE:
ARPA-E seeks input from researchers and technologists of various backgrounds and representing a broad range of fields and disciplines, with the goal of evaluating novel approaches to providing diagnostic, prognostic, and control capabilities to significantly increase performance and accelerate adoption of energy storage systems. The information you provide may be used by ARPA-E in support of program planning. THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THIS NOTICE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A FUNDING OPPORTUNITY ANNOUNCEMENT (FOA). NO FOA EXISTS AT THIS TIME.

CONTACT INFORMATION:
To submit comments to the Request for Information (RFI): Please submit any comments in PDF format to the email address ARPA-E-RFI-SMART@hq.doe.gov by 8:00 PM Eastern Time on March 9, 2012. ARPA-E will not review or consider comments submitted by other means.

SUBMISSION DEADLINES:

• Concept Paper Submission Deadline: TBD ET
• Concept Paper Submission Deadline: TBD ET
• Full Application Submission Deadline: TBD

See the full RFI attached.

NIST Foundations for Innovation for Cyber-Physical Systems | March 13-14, 2012

Home | Background | Committee & Speakers | Agenda | Registration | Hotel/Travel | Downloads | Contacts | Submit Your Ideas

We want your ideas!

This is your opportunity, as someone working in the field, to voice your ideas and present innovative solutions to the challenging problems facing the development and use of cyber-physical systems.

Your ideas will be added to the body of knowledge gained at this important CPS workshop, and your name will be included as a contributor in the workshop report (without attribution to specific ideas).

Please select from the following topic areas and prepare a response of 1000 words or less.

• Topic 1. Identify one to five elements that are critical to future CPS systems and why – i.e., what is the vision for future CPS systems? These could be new technologies, higher performance functionalities, or other elements.
   
• Topic 2. Identify one of the most pressing technology and measurement challenges for CPS – and an innovative approach or solution. Include R&D or other actions that are necessary to your approach.
   
• Topic 3. Identify collaborative activities, consortia, or other cooperative approaches that could potentially accelerate development and use of CPS.

Click below to submit your ideas on CPS R&D barriers and challenges, promising new solutions, and the breakthrough science and technology R&D needed to make it happen.

Submit Ideas

Copyright © 2012 Energetics Incorporated

The High Confidence Software and Systems (HCSS) Coordinating Group (CG) of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) subcommittee seeks input from government agencies, researchers, and industry regarding problems, questions, and new directions for research on technology for time-critical systems.

Each new generation of cyber-physical systems (CPS) raises the level of trust that people must put in these systems, while achieving assurances that the systems are worthy of that trust becomes more difficult.  Examples of critical reliance on cyber-physical systems can be seen in defense systems, civil aviation, highways, energy production, advanced manufacturing, and modern healthcare.  These systems make increasingly complex demands for real-time coordination among distributed subsystems.    Even the current generation of large-scale real-time cyber-physical systems may unpredictably miss timing requirements, and expose the whole system to the risk of failure.  Certainly progress on future systems will suffer without a better theory and practice of timed CPS. This calls for "new clockwork".

Advances in distributed clock synchronization technology, such as GPS time and IEEE 1588, present new opportunities and new challenges.  On one hand, widely distributed systems can have a nearly synchronous view of the current time, thereby, enabling better functionality and greater reliability so long as the synchronization mechanism works.  On the other hand, mechanisms for time synchronization do fail.  Natural phenomena and intentionally malicious attacks can disrupt timing in complex systems with catastrophic effects.

Several recent trends have exacerbated time-related problems by increasing reliance on technologies with intrinsic time variability such as wireless communication, multi-core processors, virtualization, and "cloud" computing.  Advances in the science of time-critical systems are needed if we are to be able to exploit the benefits of these technologies with assurance that systems will operate safely and reliably.

How can we leverage this technology while mitigating our risks and vulnerabilities?  How do we build systems that benefit from precise global clock synchronization but degrade gracefully if synchronization fails?

The HCSS Coordinating Group envisions a workshop, to be held in early 2013, with the goal of defining a list of needs for research on time-critical aspects of cyber-physical systems, so that future research agendas in CPS can develop robust foundations for reasoning about time on cyber-physical systems across scales, managing resources to meet timeliness requirements, and ensuring service agreements through new tools, techniques and methodologies.  It should address the problems of what kinds of temporal properties need to be met, how to realize solutions in software and hardware, what kinds of mechanisms would be useful, and how they could coexist across distributed hardware/software/network stacks.  The workshop will produce a NITRD publication for the HCSS CG.

We are seeking input from government agencies, researchers, and industry regarding problems, questions, and new directions for research on technology for time-critical systems, please fill out our New Clockwork for Time-Critical Systems Request for Information (RFI) Response.

The Object Management Group and Toyota would like to invite you to participate in and contribute to the “Assuring Dependability of Consumer Devices RFI” (Request for Information). “Consumer devices” is a broad category of general end-user products that includes automobiles, consumer electronics, service robots, and smart houses. Unlike industrial devices, consumer devices are massive in numbers, used by the general public, lower in cost, maintained infrequently if ever, and used in an open, dynamic and diverse environment. These devices are often networked together so software issues can spread well beyond the initially affected device. This RFI is the first step toward developing a specification to standardize the process, methodologies, and tools to assure the software dependability of consumer devices.

The Systems Assurance Task Force is requesting information on process models, methodologies, support tools and the interfaces to realize simultaneous development of embedded control software and dependability cases.

This RFI was recently issued at OMG’s Santa Clara TC meeting and is now available for review: http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?sysa/2011-12-02

A supporting whitepaper is posted at: http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?sysa/2011-12-08

**RFI responses are due Before May 20, 2012**

Get Involved! Attend these Upcoming Events: (see links below):

March 19-23, 2012 – OMG Technical Meeting – Hyatt Regency Reston, VA

June 18-22, 2012 – OMG Technical Meeting – Hyatt Regency Cambridge, MA USA

Please forward this e-mail to anyone (government, industry or academia, national or international) whom you believe would be interested in identifying: (1) any public roads that are instrumented for connected vehicle research as in a living laboratory; or, (2) their laboratory as one that can contribute to the state-of-the-art in transportation operations research and development. FHWA has posted a formal Request For Information (RFI) at www.fbo.gov. Merely type-in DTFH61-11-I-00046 in the Keyword/Solicitation # box to access the RFI, entitled, "Information to Assist in the Establishment of the Transportation Operations Laboratory (TOL) and Identification of Potential Research Partners." A copy is attached. Responses are due by May 13, 2011.

Information gained from responses will assist FHWA in further design and operations of its Transportation Operations Laboratory, including 3 nascent testbeds: (1) Data Resources; (2) Concepts and Analysis; and, (3) Cooperative Vehicle-Highway Systems. It will also identify potential stakeholders who may wish to join in collaborative efforts to conduct research of mutual interest in the primary area of transportation operations. [Please Note: This is not a solicitation for proposals or proposal abstracts] Of special interest is the capability to test cooperative traveler-vehicle-highway systems, especially using multiple vehicles in a communications rich environment that allows for 2-way communications among: the infrastructure (e.g., traffic signals, roadside equipment, etc); travelers (e.g., drivers, passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians); and vehicles (e.g., buses, trucks, cars). Attached is a list of data items drawn from the RFI that if provided would be very helpful in compiling a directory.

Please direct any questions to Bob Ferlis, Robert.Ferlis@dot.gov, or to me, Joe.Peters@dot.gov.

Thanks for your help in this important effort.

Joe Peters Joseph I. Peters, Ph.D. Director, Office of Operations R&D Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center 6300 Georgetown Pike (HRDO-1) McLean, VA 22101