ISE Seminar Series - Thesis Defense

"Generalized Construction of Trend Resistant 2-Level Split-Plot Designs"

Guillermo Lopez
Master of Science Candidate
Industrial and Systems Engineering

Date: Friday, October 27th, 2006
Time: 2:00pm
Location: Room 09-1139 (Kate Gleason Engineering Building)

Common experimental practices suggest randomizing the order in which runs are performed. However, there may be situations in which randomization might not produce the most desirable order, especially in the presence of known trends. There has been research done on systematically designing experiments to be robust against trends. However, few of them address the additional dimensions that arise in nested designs such as split-plot designs. Split-plot designs have been used for many years in agricultural applications and are sometimes preferred where there are hard-to-change factors in industrial settings. There currently is no established methodology to produce split-plot designs that are robust to potential two-dimension trends. The objective of this work is to develop a methodology to design run orders for two-level, split-plot designs that are robust or nearly robust against a set of trends. Two methods are developed in this work. An adapted fold-over method uses already established principles of the fold-over extended for us in split-plot designs. The second method uses an integer linear programming approach to search for an optimal design that is resistant to specific trends. A comparison between the two methods is presented and evaluated with a proposed set of metrics.

Thesis Committee:
Dr. Andres Carrano (Chair), Industrial and Systems Engineering
Dr. Brian Thorn, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Questions?
Contact Dr. Michael Kuhl at 475-2134 or mekeie@rit.edu