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Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Systems Science (SYS) program is a discretionary grant opportunity (CFDA 47.041, Engineering Grants) that funds fundamental, theory-driven research aimed at building a stronger scientific and theoretical foundation for design and systems engineering. The core goal is to move beyond ad hoc or purely practice-based approaches and instead develop general, domain-independent explanatory models that help explain how design and systems engineering work, why certain approaches succeed or fail, and how these processes can be improved in a principled way. The program emphasizes integrating and abstracting established theories from fields like probability, decision theory, game theory, organizational sociology, behavioral economics, and cognitive psychology, then translating those ideas into systems-oriented models that can generate testable hypotheses. A key expectation is an evidence-driven loop: models should lead to hypotheses, hypotheses should be evaluated through data or other rigorous evidence, and the resulting findings should be used to refine or update the models.

SYS is explicitly not a place for work that is only loosely related to systems engineering, and it also does not support proposals that are primarily domain-specific applications of those underlying theories. In other words, simply applying game theory or decision theory to a particular industry or engineered product area, without contributing to generalizable knowledge about design and systems engineering, is considered out of scope. However, projects that do have a domain focus can still fit if they simultaneously advance fundamental understanding of design and systems engineering in a way that generalizes beyond the chosen application; in those cases, NSF notes that co-funding with other programs may be possible. The guidance given is to submit such proposals to the most appropriate disciplinary program and list Systems Science as a secondary program to enable coordination.

The research topics highlighted by the program revolve around four broad areas. First is the design and systems engineering process itself, framed as a complex search through a design space involving many synthesis and analysis steps carried out sequentially and in parallel, with increasing fidelity over time. NSF is interested in research that clarifies how this search should be structured and managed, including how to monitor progress, guide and control decision-making, choose meaningful progress metrics, select or adapt search strategies, frame individual design decisions, and decide what abstractions are appropriate at each stage. This includes questions about how much designers should account for downstream steps while making current decisions, which gets at planning, foresight, and the compounding effects of early choices.

Second is the organizational context of design and systems engineering. Because real systems are built by teams and institutions, SYS supports work on how to decompose large problems into parts, delegate responsibilities, and coordinate across subteams, especially when expertise spans multiple disciplines. The program is interested in how incentives shape design outcomes, how organizational structures interact with technical decomposition, and how communication and collaboration can be improved among experts with different backgrounds. The solicitation points out that rigorous progress here often sits at the boundary between engineering and the social sciences, making interdisciplinary collaboration particularly relevant.

Third is modeling: how models are created, used, taught, evaluated, and shared in design and systems engineering practice. SYS treats models as central tools for communication, prediction, and efficient exploration of alternatives, while also acknowledging open scientific questions about modeling itself. Areas of interest include how to choose an appropriate modeling formalism for a given purpose, the cognitive aspects of how humans build and reason with models, effective methods for teaching modeling to engineering students, mechanisms to encourage reuse and sharing of models, and rigorous ways to assess model accuracy, applicability, and limits of validity.

Fourth is research methodology for design and systems engineering, recognizing that this research is partly normative because it ultimately aims to improve design practice. That creates methodological challenges about defining and measuring "goodness" in a defensible way. SYS is interested in questions such as what metrics should represent design quality or process quality, how those metrics can be measured rigorously, and what kinds of evidence should be considered acceptable when comparing different design methods or systems engineering approaches. This focus pushes proposals to be explicit about evaluation, inference, and the standards of proof used to justify claims that one method is better than another.

In terms of basic opportunity details, this is an NSF grant program with an unrestricted eligibility statement (open to any type of entity, subject to any additional eligibility text in the full announcement). NSF anticipated around 15 awards for the referenced cycle, and there is no cost sharing or matching requirement. The opportunity was posted October 21, 2014, with submission windows indicated around early to mid-February (with annual windows thereafter as noted in the source text), and a listed current closing date of September 15, 2015. The archive date is October 15, 2028, meaning the record remains accessible for reference. For access or technical issues, the provided point of contact is grants.gov support at grantsgovsupport@nsf.gov, and the full program description is linked through NSF under PD 14-8085.

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