Expedition MARS: Next-Generation Experimental Designs for Product and Process Innovation

Gaining competitive advantage requires today’s businesses to innovate at an increasing speed. New product development is at the heart of innovation and requires substantial experimentation. The field of “design of experiments” delivers systematic plans to determine the settings that lead to optimal products, but the existing experimental designs tend to be inflexible, time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, they are often not suitable for practical experimentation. By means of innovative advanced optimization techniques, we have built an impressive database of novel cost-efficient MARS designs (where the abbreviation MARS refers to the technical properties of the designs), and have developed a first version of a software prototype that intuitively guides a practitioner toward the most suitable design for a broad class of applications. Our work has been received well within the academic community and we were advised several times concerning its potential impact, due to its value for many application fields such as pharma, agriculture, manufacturing industries, etc. Through this project we aim to valorize this cutting-edge solution that allows many businesses to innovate efficiently.

Keywords:design of experiments, statistical software, integer linear programming

Disciplines:Applied mathematics in specific fields, Statistics and numerical methods