Design of experiments (DOE)

This chapter comprises five sections. The first section is an introduction to DOE containing guidelines and some basic concepts and principles. The next three sections present examples published some years ago in diverse journals. Each example represents a different application category: a simulation experiment, a physical experiment, and a complex analytical expression. The scene of the simulation experiment was set in a flexible manufacturing environment and its aim was to investigate the impact of several factors in this environment. The physical experiment has been carried out to improve the quality of a special type of batteries. The third example examined the numerical value of a deterministic complex analytical expression representing a customer oriented logistics performance measure, as calculated for different values of its parameters (the given numerical values of the investigated factors). A review of these three examples has been recently published in Applied Mathematics, see Barad 2014. The fifth section presents a discussion of Taguchi’s contribution to experimental design.