Using Simulation and Graphics as an Aid in Planning Complicated Experiments

Presented: Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Speaker: Dr. William Meeker, Iowa State University

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The combination of Monte Carlo simulation and graphics provides powerful tools for helping to plan complicated experiments. Although the ideas apply more generally, this talk will describe a collection of methods and procedures that have been developed for planning engineering reliability experiments. Such experiments include life tests, accelerated life tests, repeated measures degradation tests, and accelerated destructive degradation tests. The design of such reliability experiments typically requires answering questions about sample size, length of the test and, for accelerated tests, allocation of test units to different levels of the accelerating variable(s). Models for the data from such experiments must accommodate complications such as random effects, nonlinear estimation, and censoring. As such, standard experimental design tools need to be extended. I will describe methods that employ graphical displays for combinations of large-sample approximations for precision metrics and for the display of simulation results. Simulation will be shown to be a particularly versatile and valuable tool for providing insights into such complicated experimental design problems.