This paper describes a research program aimed at improved largGscaleacmauh 'cal systems. ' h e research involves new approaches to system decomposition, interdisciplinary communication, and methods of exploiting coarse-grained parallelism for analysis and optimization. A new architecture. that involves a tight coupling between optimization and analysis, is intended to improve efficiency while simplifying the structure of multidisciplinary, computation-intensive design problems involving many analysis disciplines and perhaps hundreds of design variables. Work in two areas is described here: system decomposition using compatibility constraints to simplify the analysis structure and take advantage of coarse-grained parallelism; and collaborative optimization, a decomposition of the optimization process to permit parallel design and to simplify interdisciplinary communication require- summarvAlthough ane often thinks of multidisciplinary opimization of an aircraft configmtion as pceeding logically from geometrical description to disciplinary analyses to performance constraint evaluation, the actual structure of analysesin an aircraft conceptualdesign method is much more complex. Figure 1 shows the connections between just some of the subroutines in one such program (Ref. 1).

No abstract