8.6 Design of Experiments

The automatic generation of experiments is taken care of by a DoE module that runs as an external executable and communicates with the environment using a tool agent. A number of design types is available (Table 8.2)[KPR96]. The screening analysis design SA  provides a simple means to generate a number of experiments along each axis of the design space with all other coordinates remaining at their respective default values. The supplementary design SUP  is an implementation of [STA95], aiming at minimizing the number of additional experiments required when adding a new control variable to an existing set of experiments at the cost of a slightly sub-optimum design with respect to the standard CCC design. See [LA91] for an extensive treatment of the design of experiments.

 
Table 8.2:   Summary of design types provided by the DoE module.

For each experiment generated by the DoE module, an EVI is added to the active EVE and submitted for evaluation. On return, the computed results are read and written to the EVI. Optionally, control values generated automatically may be modified interactively before starting an evaluation.