What is Design of Experiments?
What do people mean when they say that they are using or applying Design of Experiments (DOE)? They’re saying first of all that they are going to use a PLAN to find an answer to industrial, technical, and scientific questions. This plan is an experiment design. Furthermore, all experiment designs include the following elements: an ordered set of trials, each trial consisting of the specific settings for each factor (controllable input), and a mathematical model to use for making predictions for the trials that were not run. All experiment designs are also concerned with one or more responses (outputs, independent variables); responses define the point of the experiment design. For most problems, it is simply not economical or even possible to try all of the possible combinations. The goal of all DOE is “to run a few and predict the rest.” Using the designated mathematical model and appropriate software, an experimenter can explore the predicted results for all possible combinations.
