PLACE:

SPEAKER:
Professor C.F. Jeff Wu
University of Michigan

TITLE:
Industrial experimental design since Box, Hunter and Hunter (1978)

ABSTRACT:
There have been several major advances in industrial experimental design since the 1978 publication of the influential book by Box, Hunter an Hunter. The most obvious one was brought about by the work of Taguchi on robust parameter design and his style of doing practical industrial work. Because of the new ( as o f1985) emphasis on variation reduction through the explicit use of noise factors in the experiment, new paradigms and methodologies have been proposed in the last decade. I will first review the major work in this area on performance measures, planning techniques, and modeling and analysis strategies. Another major change is the extensive use of designs (i.e., experimental plans) that have mixed-levels and complex aliasing among their effects. The original motivation for their use was run size economy and flexibility. "Traditional wisdom" dictated that these designs be used only for screening purposes. It turns out that they can also be used for estimation a small to moderate number of interactions. Analysis strategies and supporting design-theoretic work will be presented. Returning to the 2-level and 3-level regular fractional factorial designs, the minimum aberration criterion has emerged as the major criterion for selecting optimal fractional factorial designs. Some results and practical implication on the use of this criterion will be presented. The coverage of Box, Hunter and Hunter ( and any design texts) on non-normal data is minimal. As the last topic I will survey the recent work on analysis of non-normal data from fractionated experiments. Typically these strategies exploit the design structure an should be distinguished from standard regression strategies that do not take the design structure into account. Many of these new methods/techniques are covered in the forthcoming book " Experiments: Planning, Analysis, and Parameter Design Optimization" by Wu and Hamada (Wiley, 2000).

COFFEE:  3:45p.m.