In engineering it is usually necessary to design systems as cheap as possible whilst ensuring that certain constraints are satisfied. Computational optimisation methods can help to find optimal designs. However, it is demonstrated in this work that an optimal design is often not robust against variations caused by the manufacturing process, which would result in unsatisfactory product quality. ...

Feedback control schemes have been widely used in many engineering applications for a long time. Despite this, there has been very little work done on eecient design of experiments for modeling feedback control processes in order to select the appropriate feedback variables. This paper considers a general statistical formulation of this problem and studies the properties of optimal designs in t...

Title of Document: MULTI-DISCIPLINARY SYSTEM DESIGN OPTIMIZATION Kevin Luft Master of Engineering Management Old Dominion University, Virginia Master of Science, Systems Engineering, 2006 University of Maryland, College Park Directed By: Dr. Mark Austin Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Institute for Systems Research University of Maryland, College Park Multidisciplinary Sys...

In this paper we consider the problem of constructing T -optimal discriminating designs for Fourier regression models. We provide explicit solutions of the optimal design problem for discriminating between two Fourier regression models, which differ by at most three trigonometric functions. In general, the T -optimal discriminating design depends in a complicated way on the parameters of the la...

Internally heat-integrated distillation columns (HIDiC) are a new design option to provide a sustainable separation system. Although significant energy savings can be achieved using this setup, a considerable increase in investment cost penalizes the application. One major cost driver is the compressor cost, which depends on the relative volatility of the mixture to be separated. While mixtures...

This paper is concerned with the optimal approximation of a given multivariate Dirac mixture, i.e., a density comprising weighted Dirac distributions on a continuous domain, by an equally weighted Dirac mixture with a reduced number of components. The parameters of the approximating density are calculated by minimizing a smooth global distance measure, a generalization of the well-known Cramér-...

Abstract Paired comparisons are a popular tool for questionnaires in psychological marketing research. The quality of the statistical analysis of the responses heavily depends on the design, i.e. the choice of the alternatives in the comparisons. In this paper we show that the structure of locally optimal designs changes substantially with the parameters in the underlying utility. This fact is ...

Optimal control problems involve the difficult task of determining time-varying profiles through dynamic optimization. Such problems become even more complex in practical situations where handling time dependent uncertainties becomes an important issue. Approaches to stochastic optimal control problems have been reported in the finance literature and are based on real option theory, combining I...

D-optimal regression designs under random block-e ects models are considered. In addition to selecting design points, an experimenter also needs to specify how they are grouped into blocks. We rst consider minimum-support designs, which are supported on the minimum number of design points. In this case, it is shown that a D-optimal design can be obtained by combining a D-optimal block design (f...