POSE: Phase I: Open-Source Decision Support in the Design of Engineering Systems

This Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) project improves how engineers design complex systems. Critical challenges in areas such as energy systems and infrastructure resilience require design methods that can balance evolving and competing needs while accounting for multiple types of uncertainty. Conventional optimization approaches often fail because they focus too narrowly on perfect theoretical solutions that meet optimality requirements rather than practical, adaptable results. This project addresses this limitation by developing an ecosystem for a design tool that prioritizes robust, workable solutions. By bringing together researchers, educators, and industry professionals, the project accelerates innovation in sectors including materials, advanced manufacturing, national defense, and biomedical technology. The project strengthens science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education by making this practical tool more accessible in classrooms, reinforcing America's competitive edge in engineering. The potential benefits are wide ranging: faster development of sustainable technologies, cost savings for businesses, better solutions for the pressing challenges in manufacturing, and infrastructure improvement. These advances align with national interests in economic growth, security, and scientific leadership while creating a new model for cooperative engineering development. This POSE project establishes an ecosystem for Decision Support in the Design of Engineering Systems (DSIDES), a decision-support tool that manages multi-stage, nonconvex, and multicriteria design problems through satisficing strategies. Satisficing strategies provide robust alternatives to conventional optimization methods by delivering solutions resilient to four uncertainty types: noise factors, control variations, model inaccuracies, and mitigation effects. Project activities include developing governance structures and participation standards, creating training resources, enabling user contributions, and conducting outreach through workshops and conferences. The project evaluation will track the user base expansion across disciplines, frequency and quality of community contributions, customized module development, and application variations. By integrating the governance team, distributed developers, and end-users through structured collaboration mechanisms, this ecosystem will elevate a technically mature but underrecognized tool into a widely adopted platform for complex system design. The outcome will be a sustainable community that advances robust design methodologies and practices across engineering fields. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.