Optimal Experimental Design

Abstract

In environmental and water resource (EWR) engineering, different types of design problems exist, such as operation design, monitoring design, detection design, and remediation design. This chapter is devoted to the subject of experimental design for model calibration and parameter estimation. Experimental design plays a critical role in model construction because the reliability of a model is mainly dependent on the quantity and quality of data used for its calibration. In other words, the experimental design dictates how data should be collected in field campaigns and how many observations are needed. An optimal experimental design (OED), when it is executed, should provide the maximum amount of information with the minimum cost. Basic concepts, theories, and methods of OED are well established in statistics and have been applied to various scientific and engineering disciplines.