Collaborative Center for Multidisciplinary Sciences Program | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Collaborative Center for Multidisciplinary Sciences Program is a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) funding opportunity intended to stand up a research partnership focused on improving how aerospace vehicles are designed, analyzed, and assessed. The program is run through AFRL/RQVC and is positioned as a science and technology research effort that blends basic and applied research. Rather than supporting a single narrowly defined study, it is aimed at creating a collaborative center-style relationship where the government and the recipient work closely to advance a set of technical capabilities that matter to system-level aerospace design decisions.

This opportunity is issued as a cooperative agreement, which typically signals a higher level of government involvement than a standard grant. In practice, that usually means the awardee and AFRL would coordinate on technical direction, milestones, data sharing, and transition planning, with AFRL actively participating in shaping the work as it evolves. The objective is to build and mature methods that can handle modern aerospace design complexity, where performance, uncertainty, and multidisciplinary interactions must be evaluated together instead of in isolation.

The technical scope centers on aerospace vehicle design and assessment methods, with particular emphasis on rigorous, high-fidelity, system-level approaches. One major area of interest is high-fidelity system-level design optimization, meaning methods that can optimize aircraft or aerospace vehicle configurations while relying on physics-based models (often computationally intensive) and capturing interactions across aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, controls, thermal, and other coupled disciplines. This kind of work tends to focus on making optimization practical at the full system level, where tradeoffs are real and changes in one domain can cause cascading effects elsewhere.

Another emphasized topic is risk-quantified multi-source coupled analyses and sensitivities. This points to approaches that integrate multiple modeling sources (for example, different fidelity simulations, empirical models, test data, or surrogate models) into a coherent coupled analysis framework, then quantify risk and uncertainty in the outputs. It also includes sensitivity analysis, which is used to identify which inputs, assumptions, or model parameters most strongly influence outcomes. The “risk-quantified” framing highlights that AFRL is not only interested in point predictions, but also in confidence bounds, probability of meeting requirements, and decision-relevant measures of uncertainty.

The announcement also calls out goal-oriented adaptive analyses, which generally refers to adaptive computational methods that focus refinement effort where it most improves a specific quantity of interest. Instead of uniformly increasing model resolution everywhere (which can be prohibitively expensive), goal-oriented adaptivity targets the parts of the model or domain that matter most for the decision metric being pursued, such as a load at a critical location, drag in a particular regime, or a stability margin. This aligns with the broader theme of making high-fidelity analysis more efficient and more directly tied to design decisions.

A further area is risk-quantified design space exploration, which is about systematically mapping how design choices influence performance and risk across a wide range of possible configurations. Design space exploration can involve large-scale parametric sweeps, surrogate modeling, uncertainty propagation, and multi-objective trade studies, with the added requirement here that the exploration be tied to quantified risk. The intent is to support decision-making under uncertainty, allowing designers to see not just what looks optimal under ideal assumptions, but what remains robust when uncertainties and model limitations are accounted for.

Finally, the scope explicitly includes experimental validation. That indicates AFRL’s interest in grounding modeling and simulation advances in real data, whether through wind tunnel testing, component or subsystem tests, flight-relevant experiments, or other validation activities appropriate to the methods being developed. Validation is often the bridge between new analysis approaches and their credible use in operational or acquisition contexts, so including it as a named area underscores that the program is meant to produce methods that are not only innovative, but also demonstrably reliable.

Administratively, the opportunity is listed under Funding Opportunity Number FOA AFRL RQKP 2016 0001 and is categorized as a discretionary award in the science and technology / research and development domain. The CFDA number provided is 12.800, associated with Department of Defense research programs. Eligibility is described as unrestricted, meaning any type of entity may apply, subject to any additional constraints that might be specified in the full announcement text. The agency is the Department of Defense, Air Force Research Laboratory (DOD-AFRL). The posting and creation dates are April 28, 2016, and the closing date is May 30, 2016.

The opportunity anticipates making a single award (ExpectedAwards: 1). An award ceiling is not specified in the excerpt provided, suggesting that either the ceiling is defined in the full announcement or that the government intended to evaluate funding levels based on proposed scope and negotiated terms. Overall, the program is best understood as an AFRL-supported collaborative center effort to advance next-generation multidisciplinary aerospace design, analysis, uncertainty quantification, and validation methods, with an emphasis on system-level realism and decision-grade risk quantification.

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