A Criterion for Assessment of Search Designs in Robust Parameter Experiments

Production of high-quality products necessitates identifying the most influential factors, among many factors, for controlling and reducing quality variation. In such a setting, the factorial designs are utilized to determine the active factors with maximal information and model an appropriate relation between the factors and the variable of interest. In this regard, robust parameter designs dividing the factors to control- and noise factors are efficient methods for offline quality control for stabilizing the quality variation in the presence of the noise factors. Interestingly, this could be achieved through exploiting active control by noise interactions. One needs to experiment with numerous treatments to detect the active interaction effects. Search designs are suggested to save treatments, and a superior one is recommended among the appropriate ones. To determine the superior design, one needs a design criterion; however, the existing criteria could be more beneficial for robust parameter designs. In this paper, we proposed a criterion to rank the search designs and determine the superior one.