Generating and Comparing Pareto Fronts of Experiment Designs to Simultaneously Account for Multiple Experimental Objectives

• Activity Number: 321
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
• Author(s): Byran Jay Smucker* and Yongtao Cao and Timothy Robinson
• Companies: Miami University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania and University of Wyoming
• Keywords: hypervolume ; coordinate exchange ; multi-objective

Abstract

There is a general and growing acknowledgement within the experiment design community that in realistic design scenarios the experimenter typically entertains multiple, conflicting objectives. The Pareto approach to optimal experiment design constructs a set of designs while explicitly considering trade-offs between opposing criteria. The true Pareto front in these optimization problems is not known, and this creates problems in assessing the quality of competing Pareto fronts. Furthermore, existing algorithms are either relatively slow, or produce low-quality fronts, or both. In this talk, we introduce an improved measure of front assessment that provides a way to fairly compare fronts. We also briefly present a new algorithm to generate Pareto fronts of designs, along with an associated philosophy of algorithm development.