Department of Transportation awards $127 million contract to KBR for tech modernization services

KBR won a $126.7 million recompete by the U.S. Department of Transportation Volpe National Transportation Systems Center for Mission Information Technology Support (MITS) Services in Cambridge, Massachusetts to modernize technical, logistical, and safety-related transportation systems, the company announced.

KBR has worked on this project for 11 years at the Volpe Center to advance transportation innovation for the public good.

Under the terms of the hybrid cost-plus, time-and-materials contract, KBR will deliver technical support to the Volpe Center, which provides solutions to meet 21^st century challenges, such as modernization efforts in physical safety, cybersecurity, environmental impacts, and traffic management.

This work is expected to be performed over four years with KBR providing information technology, software and systems engineering for all modes of transportation for several government entities, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Federal Highway Administration, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Department of Defense, and Department of Interior.

Projects will focus on safety management and human factors; air traffic management and operations; infrastructure systems and technology; and transportation environmental impact assessments. KBR will utilize its unique capabilities in cloud services, modern web frameworks, modeling and simulation techniques, agile and DevSecOps development, big data, analytics, as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning to carry out this work.

KBR has provided construction and software engineering to infrastructure systems across all modes of U.S. transportation, the UK Ministry of Defense, and other government entities for decades. Some major project highlights from recent efforts for the Volpe Center demonstrate KBR’s contribution to modernize the industry:

• Developed the FAA Safety Assurance System, a web application with millions of lines of code to improve aviation safety and oversight.
• Developed a deep-learning system to validate the performance of the MobileEye collision avoidance system to detect pedestrians in front of moving vehicles.
• Modernized the NHTSA Artemis system used to identify and address potential safety defects in motor vehicles and inform recall actions.
• Conducted a big-data pilot project that uses machine learning methods to estimate crash risk and reportable traffic crashes to help emergency responders, traffic management centers, and law enforcement proactively allocate resources
• Designed and implemented the National Airspace System Common Reference (NCR) system that translates FAA System Wide Information Management data into geo-referenced data. NCR helps the FAA provide essential data to air traffic operations in the national air space.