Continuous-Effort Approach to Model-Based Experimental Designs

Model-based design of experiments is a technique for accelerating the development of mathematical models. Through maximally informative experiments, time and resources for estimating uncertain model parameters are minimized. This article presents a method for computing effort-based experimental designs, whereby designs are akin to experimental recipes. As well as identifying which experiments are the most informative, the optimal experimental effort to dedicate to each experiment is also optimized. Upon discretizing the experimental design space and treating the efforts as continuous decision variables, this method leads to convex optimization problems regardless of the model structure, which is ideal for large, parallel experimental campaigns. The case study of a batch reactor model with four parameters is presented to illustrate the methodology.