Efficient response-surface designs with unknown block sizes

Abstract

This paper focuses on the construction of D- and Ds-optimal designs for a secondorder response surface model when the block sizes are not fixed. Overviews of the Procedure OPTEX in SAS for the construction of these designs are given. With the BLOCK statement this procedure can produce optimal designs when the block sizes are fixed but for unknown block sizes it requires additional programming to generate the optimal designs for a given number of runs and number of blocks (see Atkinson, Donev and Tobias, 2007). An example about a pastry dough experiment (Goos and Jones, 2011) is used to demonstrate how to generate designs in such situations.