This award will provide funding for a two-day workshop on the Design of Engineered Complex Systems, to be held in Arlington, VA, in September 2009. The workshop will focus on methodologies for the conceptual design of engineered complex systems. Many of the most challenging engineering design problems today involve engineered complex systems. An especially challenging research area is conceptual design, i.e., making design decisions when major aspects of the system are only vaguely specified, and where mathematical descriptions are elusive. It is anticipated that the workshop will involve about 100 participants, split between industry and academia. The speakers will be experts in a variety of disciplines related to engineered complex systems.
If successful, the workshop will identify promising research directions in this challenging and relatively unexplored research area. Because of the many areas in which engineered complex systems arise (energy production, transportation, climate modeling, nanotechnology, etc.) there is the potential for significant societal impact in a vast number of applications. The ideas and directions identified at the workshop have the potential to influence a variety of fundamental research areas (optimization, dynamic systems, control systems) as well as influence research in the application areas mentioned above (energy, etc.).
