Building Engineered Complex Systems | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The NSF opportunity "Building Engineered Complex Systems" (NSF 09-610) is a joint solicitation from the Directorate for Engineering (ENG) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS). Its core purpose is to provide seed funding to small, interdisciplinary teams that pair engineering with mathematics or statistics to build a stronger theoretical foundation for complex systems and, ultimately, to create formal, design-oriented methods for engineered complex systems. The solicitation is aimed at work that goes beyond incremental modeling of individual components and instead develops principles, theory, and mathematical tools that help engineers design systems whose behavior cannot be understood by looking at parts in isolation.

The program is centered on the idea of complex systems and emergence. NSF describes a complex system as one where patterns of structure or behavior at one level of organization reveal interactions among parts at other levels, producing emergent behavior or structure that is not obvious from studying the components separately. The motivation behind the program is that many real-world systems, including a large and growing set of engineered systems, behave in ways that defeat traditional reductionist approaches. In reductionism, you understand the whole by understanding each part; in complex systems, interactions across scales and networks can generate new behaviors, cascading effects, and surprises that component-level analyses miss. The solicitation notes that this gap has been exposed by unexpected failures and unintended consequences, especially when engineered systems operate near their performance limits.

NSF highlights several example domains where complexity and emergent behavior matter in practice: power grids, traffic systems, critical civil infrastructure, advanced materials, chemical and industrial process systems, manufacturing and service enterprises, and environmental systems. These are systems where interdependence, feedback loops, network structure, uncertainty, and multi-scale dynamics can create fragile conditions or abrupt transitions, sometimes leading to outages, congestion collapse, infrastructure failures, or other systemic disruptions. At the same time, the solicitation also treats emergence as an opportunity, not only a risk: complex systems can potentially be designed to be resilient and robust, meaning they can absorb disturbances, adapt, and continue functioning despite failures or changing conditions. A major thrust of the program is therefore to enable theory and methods that support intentional design for robustness and resilience rather than relying on ad hoc fixes after problems appear.

As a seed-funding program, the expectation is that projects will be exploratory but conceptually ambitious, helping establish the theoretical basis needed for formal design methods. This implies emphasis on foundational frameworks, mathematical formalisms, and principled approaches that could later scale into larger research efforts or broader engineering practice. While the solicitation text does not list specific topic areas in the excerpt provided, the stated aim strongly suggests work at the interface of engineering design and mathematical sciences, such as new modeling paradigms for emergence, analytical tools for multi-level interactions, networked and distributed system theory, uncertainty quantification for coupled systems, stability and robustness concepts for interconnected infrastructures, and mathematically grounded design rules for systems that must perform reliably under stress.

The opportunity uses the NSF grant funding instrument and falls under the research and development activity category. NSF anticipated making about 20 awards, with an estimated total funding amount of $4,000,000, and it explicitly states there is no cost sharing or matching requirement. The CFDA numbers associated with the program are 47.041 (Engineering Grants) and 47.049 (Mathematical and Physical Sciences), reflecting the cross-directorate nature of the solicitation.

Eligibility is limited to US-based academic institutions: accredited US universities and colleges, including two-year and four-year institutions (community colleges included), with a campus located in the United States, submitting on behalf of their faculty. Principal Investigators must be at the faculty level as defined by the submitting organization. A strict team composition requirement applies: at least one co-PI must be an engineer and at least one co-PI must be a mathematical scientist (mathematician or statistician). Proposals that do not meet this interdisciplinary co-PI requirement are returned without review, which signals that NSF is prioritizing genuine collaboration rather than loosely connected contributions.

Key dates for the original competition cycle were a submission window with deadlines by 5 p.m. local time on December 14, 2009 and January 19, 2010, with the current closing date listed as January 19, 2010. The announcement was posted and created on September 22, 2009. Additional details and the full program text were provided through NSF Publication 09-610, and applicants needing technical help accessing the announcement were directed to NSF grants.gov support via grantsgovsupport@nsf.gov.

In practical terms, this solicitation is best read as NSF trying to catalyze a community that can translate complex-systems science into actionable engineering design methodology. It targets projects that unite engineers who understand the realities and constraints of building and operating large-scale systems with mathematicians and statisticians who can develop theory, proofs, inference methods, and formal structures that make emergence, interdependence, and robustness designable rather than merely observable after the fact.

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