ABSTRACT
Many authors have emphasized the importance of product development for long-term business survival [1-4]. The rapid pace of technological progress in today’s economy makes it increasingly important to reduce development time and get new products to market quickly. Page [5] discovered that most of the development cycle was devoted to the physical development of the product. In our experience, much of that effort goes into experiments whose goals may include improving performance, comparing design alternatives, increasing reliability, or verifying that the product meets its stated goals and specifications. Thus efficient methods of experimentation can be of great value in ramping up the learning curve and accelerating the product devel opment process [6, 7].
