MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) has assisted the Air Force Civil Engineer Center in planning, executing and analyzing numerous energy resiliency readiness exercises (interchangeably referred to as Black Start exercises) over the last five years. These exercises highlight a lack of situational awareness of the operational status of critical infrastructure. The Critical Out-of-Band Resiliency Awareness (COBRA) program’s objective is to raise the standard of Department of Defense (DoD) critical infrastructure reliability and situational awareness to better meet the requirements of the DoD mission systems that the critical infrastructure supports. COBRA must display the state of health data from disparate systems (e.g., electrical, communications, environmental and safety, backup power, water) with a unified system by automating near real-time and forensic processing, visualization, alarming, and data analytics. COBRA must bridge capabilities across vendors, supervisory control and data acquisition systems, and various DoD governance authorities. In addition, COBRA must autonomously collect data over an out-of-band network and have near zero reliance on the DoD infrastructure that it supports. Deployable systems and components must maintain affordability in order to support the scalability of sensors deployed to an installation and to increase the number of installations COBRA can be deployed to. And finally, COBRA must support the rapid deployment of equipment to support both temporary emergency response deployments (fly-away kits) and long-term fixed deployments.

COBRA is a real-time, affordable, mobile, and rapidly deployable out-of-band sensor, communication, and operating picture system that provides a wide-range of data collection, observation, analytics, and decision support needs. This version of COBRA will be configured and accredited to handle controlled unclassified information data. MIT LL will be leveraging core work (internally and externally funded) in order to reduce risk. The key areas of COBRA development are developing and operationalizing an end-to-end system, creating and using analytics to synthesize the data into actionable information, and demonstrating the full system at multiple DoD sites. Success will be defined by demonstrating this capability at multiple DoD installations in an iterative spiraled development process. A series of deployments will target rapid temporary equipment deployments while the third-year deployment will target a permanent emplacement of assets. This will require all security authorizations to be in place and will stress capabilities related to rapid scalable deployments and user interfaces that make sense to both technical and non-technical team members.

The ability to rapidly deploy sensing systems to support data collection related to critical infrastructure is required to assess and maintain the health of infrastructure and their resultant impact on the mission systems that they support. Rapid deployment options ensure that systems can be quickly emplaced when and where it matters. The low-cost nature of the sensors and data exfiltration methods that do not depend on DoD communications infrastructure also enable permanent or temporary deployments to produce improved situational awareness capabilities. This program will demonstrate the ability to collect data that improves resiliency postures, supports mission partner needs, helps identify problems in real-time, and helps analysis of events after the fact.