The NSF Directorate for Engineering announces a new program to more effectively and efficiently fund research on service and manufacturing enterprises, and foundational operations research topics, called the Service, Manufacturing and Operations Research (SMOR) program.
To create this program, Engineering is merging three existing programs within the Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) Division: Operations Research (OR), Service Enterprise Systems (SES) and Manufacturing Enterprise Systems (MES).
These programs have common underlying disciplinary themes - development of innovative mathematical models, analysis and computational algorithms for decision-making. They differ in the degree to which proposed models are general-purpose and the proposed application domains.
Because of the continued convergence between service and manufacturing, NSF will implement a team-based approach to co-manage the new single program, SMOR. Two program directors will oversee the new program.
A goal of the merger is to simplify proposal preparation for an increasing number of researchers whose work fits more than one of the three programs, which we hope will result in a more efficient proposal review. The total budget for the research will remain the same.
Details of the new SMOR program will be available on the web at http://www.nsf.gov/eng/cmmi/.
Like its predecessors, the SMOR program will continue to support two main types of research: (i) innovations in general-purpose methodology related to optimization, stochastic modeling, and decision and game theory; and (ii) research grounded in relevant applications (pertaining to service and manufacturing enterprises) that require the development of novel and customized analytical and computational methodologies.
The CMMI division will begin recruiting soon for one of the two SMOR program director positions. NSF encourages INFORMS members to submit their relevant research proposals to the new program.
Diwakar Gupta
Program Director
SES & MES programs, CMMI
National Science Foundation