Additive Sequential Evolutionary Design of Experiments

Process models play important role in computer aided process engineering. Although the structure of these models are a priori known, model parameters should be estimated based on experiments. The accuracy of the estimated parameters largely depends on the information content of the experimental data presented to the parameter identification algorithm. Optimal experiment design (OED) can maximize the confidence on the model parameters. The paper proposes a new additive sequential evolutionary experiment design approach to maximize the amount of information content of experiments. The main idea is to use the identified models to design new experiments to gradually improve the model accuracy while keeping the collected information from previous experiments. This scheme requires an effective optimization algorithm, hence the main contribution of the paper is the incorporation of Evolutionary Strategy (ES) into a new iterative scheme of optimal experiment design (AS-OED). This paper illustrates the applicability of AS-OED for the design of feeding profile for a fed-batch biochemical reactor.