About the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation

The Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) supports the integration of research and education in all of its programs. CMMI funds potentially transformative research to enable advances in:

• Manufacturing and building technologies across size scales from nanometers to kilometers, with emphases on efficiency, economy, and minimal environmental footprint.
• Efficient, economical and sustainable transformation and use of engineering materials.
• Resilient and sustainable civil infrastructure and distributed infrastructure networks.
• Advances in the creation of models, analyses, and algorithms that link data with decisions related to manufacturing and service enterprises.
• Design, control, and optimization methods applied at levels ranging from component to enterprise systems.

CMMI promotes the creation, development and application of next-generation theories, tools, and models that enable the CMMI community to address major emerging challenges and opportunities. Computation, data analysis and interdisciplinary research partnerships and perspectives are integral to the advancement of knowledge.

The division encourages the submission of proposals in the following areas:

• New techniques for exploring solution spaces and exploiting computational advances to test and evaluate search strategies with the potential to transform the application of optimization methods
• Efforts that build on existing cyberinfrastructure and create, develop, and apply next generation mathematical, computational and data tools to enable major advances in CMMI-funded fields, such as:
  • Expanding and leveraging knowledge of biological processes and systems, including biomimicry or bio-emulation, for the design of smart materials, instrumentation, systems and infrastructure (living tissues may be considered to be self-designing smart materials).
  • Conducting multi-scale, multi-temporal, multi-physics-based modeling and design of materials systems and structures.
  • Emerging issues in healthcare delivery, for example, smart use of data, human-technology coordination (for, such as, aging in place), and provider-payment mechanism design.
  • Exploring and enhancing understanding of human cognitive, behavioral and social processes within engineered systems.

Efforts that involve cyber development or cyber science that go well beyond what would normally be included in the CMMI core programs will be supported through targeted solicitations.