Optimising experimental design for robust product development: a case study for high-efficiency energy generation

The development of robust products can be a tedious and expensive procedure. Our industry partner manufactures a world-leading alternative energy product, with around 200 variables affecting product quality. The prohibitive cost and time to build and test trial products creates a challenging multi-criteria optimisation problem: find the optimal setting of numerous decision variables, subject to many constraints, while minimizing the effect of noise factors and relying on only a limited number of experiments to simultaneously optimise several objective functions related to cost, quality, and functionality. Our new methodology and tools will transform the competitiveness of our industry partner and the manufacturing sector in general.