Development of a D-optimal robust design model for restricted experiments

The well-known quality improvement methodology, robust design, is a powerful and cost-effective technique for improving performance measures, which focuses on building quality into the design of products and processes. Although several approaches to robust design have been proposed in the literature, little attention has been given to the use of robust design when experiments are subject to physical restrictions and constraints, which occurs frequently in today's complex manufacturing processes. When such a situation arises, experimental design techniques traditionally used in robust design may no longer be appropriate. A logical alternative to this problem is the use of computer-generated designs, specifically D-optimal designs. In this paper, we propose a new design methodology called D-optimal robust design. A numerical example is used to show the proposed procedure, and the results determined from our proposed model are compared to those obtained by the robust design approaches previously developed.