Abstract Rapid turn-around time for investigating new design concepts is a primary force driving design productivity initiatives across the industry. An integration framework focusing on the collaborative nature of rapid design automation at the preliminary and detailed design stage would ensure higher quality designs from the beginning of the product design cycle. As a result, producing reliable, robust optimum designs from the preliminary design phase would enable companies to reduce the overall design cycle time. The focus of the present work is to study the applicability of a Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) method called Concurrent SubSpace Optimization (CSSO) for the design and optimization of large scale real-life engineering systems. This work can be divided into three parts. The first part is the introduction and development of a benchmark MDO problem that simulates the design and optimization of high temperature engine components (e.g. turbines, compressors etc.). The design problem addressed herein is a stepped beam problem that couples multiple analysis codes using NASTRAN, PATRAN (The MacNeal Schwendler Corporation 1997a,b) and Response Surface Approximations (RSA). The second part focuses on the effectiveness of the polynomial based response surface approximations for capturing the temperature in a thin walled high temperature component. Specifically, quadratic response surface approximations are being investigated for their suitability. The third and the final part provides details of the generic implementation of CSSO within iSIGHT (Engenious Software Inc. 1997) and the results of testing this implementation in application to the benchmark problem mentioned above.