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Cost-Efficient Mixed-Level Covering Designs for Testing Experiments

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Abstract

A covering design is a traditional class of experimental plans for hardware and software testing purposes. This paper presents a class of size-optimal covering designs for testing experiments with mixed-level factors. Among all the factors of different levels, one or two factors have a high number of levels while other factors form a full factorial so that all level combinations among factor pairs are “covered” at least once and appeared almost equally frequent. We use the coloring techniques for hypergraphs to construct such near-balanced mixed-level covering designs with the minimum run size.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Career Development Award of Academia Sinica (Taiwan) Grant Number 103-CDA-M04, Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) Grant Numbers 107-2118-M-001-011-MY3, 107-2321-B-001-038, and 108-2321-B-001-016. On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest. The authors are grateful to anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

    Yasmeen Akhtar

  2. Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Frederick Kin Hing Phoa

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  1. Yasmeen Akhtar
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  2. Frederick Kin Hing Phoa
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Correspondence to Frederick Kin Hing Phoa.

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Part of special issue guest edited by Pritam Ranjan and Min Yang—Algorithms, Analysis, and Advanced Methodologies in the Design of Experiments.

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Akhtar, Y., Phoa, F.K.H. Cost-Efficient Mixed-Level Covering Designs for Testing Experiments. J Stat Theory Pract 14, 6 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42519-019-0062-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42519-019-0062-7

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