Center of Excellence for Command, Control and Interoperability | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Center of Excellence for Command, Control and Interoperability grant opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number DHS-12-ST-061-002-SUPP1) was a small, targeted Department of Homeland Security discretionary award issued through the Office of Procurement Operations, Grants Division. Structured as a cooperative agreement, it was designed to support applied research and development work in the information and statistics activity area, specifically tied to advancing a prior effort known as UCASS Phase I. The program anticipated a single award, with an estimated total funding amount of $77,000 and an award ceiling of $77,000, and it did not require cost sharing or matching funds. Eligibility was limited to public and state-controlled institutions of higher education, reflecting DHS's common approach of channeling certain homeland security R&D and transition-focused activities through university-based Centers of Excellence and affiliated academic performers.

The core purpose of this phase was to build directly on accomplishments from UCASS Phase I and to accelerate progress toward a usable, demonstrable decision support capability. Rather than funding exploratory research, the scope emphasized practical refinement and readiness: taking an existing prototype and pushing it toward a form that could be shown broadly, evaluated by real users, and positioned for eventual transition into operational or programmatic use. In this context, "transition" refers to the handoff from a research prototype into a tool that stakeholders can adopt, maintain, and integrate into their workflows, which typically requires usability improvements, documentation, training, and demonstration-quality stability.

A major deliverable described in the announcement was preparation of a "widely usable demonstration version" of the prototype decision support tool. That language signals an expectation that the performer would move beyond a lab-grade prototype and produce something stable enough to be demonstrated to multiple audiences, potentially across different environments or user communities. A demonstration version generally implies attention to reliability, clearer user interfaces, repeatable workflows, and packaging or deployment steps that allow others to run or evaluate the tool without extensive developer support.

Another key objective was direct engagement with users to refine the tool and educate them, explicitly to "lay the groundwork for transition." This indicates the project was expected to involve iterative user feedback and some level of user training or onboarding, not merely technical development. In practical terms, that often means conducting structured user sessions, collecting requirements or pain points, adjusting features and interfaces accordingly, and producing guidance materials (for example, walkthroughs, training sessions, or basic documentation) so the intended user community can understand what the tool does, how to operate it, and how to interpret outputs.

The opportunity also required incorporating early versions of pre-processing and post-processing components that could integrate risk and economic modeling produced by DHS partners at CREATE. CREATE (a DHS Center of Excellence focused on risk and economic analysis) often develops models that estimate impacts, costs, and risk-related outcomes; this grant's scope suggests the decision support tool needed to be architected so it could accept model inputs, transform or prepare data for modeling (pre-processing), and then take modeling outputs and convert them into actionable displays, summaries, or decision-relevant metrics (post-processing). The emphasis on "early versions" implies incremental integration: building the scaffolding and initial pipelines needed to connect with CREATE-style modeling, even if the integration was not yet final or fully validated.

Finally, the announcement highlighted enhancing data gathering and analysis to support CCICADA and CREATE modeling needs. CCICADA is referenced as another modeling or analytic effort that depends on appropriate source data; the grant therefore expected work on improving the underlying data pipeline, such as identifying needed datasets, collecting or cleaning data, ensuring consistent formats, and performing analyses that make the data more usable for downstream modeling. In many decision support and modeling environments, data readiness is a dominant constraint, so this component suggests the award aimed to reduce friction in getting high-quality inputs into the analytical ecosystem that supports command, control, and interoperability decision-making.

Administratively, the opportunity was posted on January 30, 2012, with an original and current closing date of February 13, 2012, and it was archived on March 14, 2012. The CFDA number associated with the program was 97.061 (Centers for Homeland Security). Because it was a cooperative agreement rather than a standard grant, DHS likely anticipated substantial involvement in coordinating technical direction, integration expectations, and stakeholder engagement during performance. The funding notice directed applicants to the full funding opportunity announcement for complete details and provided a point of contact for access issues: Sean Lilly, Grants Specialist, at 202-447-5869.

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