Collaborative optimization (CO) is a multi-level decomposed methodology for a large-scale multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). CO is known to have computational and organizational advantages. Its decomposed architecture removes a necessity of direct communication among disciplines, guaranteeing their autonomy. However, CO has several problems at convergence characteristics and computation time. In this study, such features are discussed and some suggestions are made to improve the performance of CO. Only for the system level optimization, genetic algorithm is used and gradient-based method is used for subspace optimizers. Moreover, response surface models are replaced as analyses in subspaces. In this manner, CO is applied to aero-structural design problems of the aircraft wing and its results are compared with the multidisciplinary feasible (MDF) method and the original CO. Through these results, it is verified that the suggested approach improves convergence characteristics and offers a proper solution.