Cost Analysis 

 

The traditional cost of an experiment entails resources such as energy, materials, time and money. Here, however, a cost to generate the actual design is assessed, thus attempting an economics-based approach. In precedent work, our research group devised different strategies to generate experimental designs for tens of variables with the intention to obtain a full quadratic model with the least possible number of experimental runs (Méndez-Vázquez, Ramírez-Rojas, and Cabrera-Ríos 2013). The designs for 50 variables are the focus of analysis here due to the potential they offer for system characterization, modeling and optimization.

          The costing approach was developed based on computing time and the cost associated to the purchase of necessary software to generate the design.  The table below shows the estimated associated costs. It is important to note that, in the second category, it is possible to reduce the software cost to 0 with the use of freely-distributed electronic spreadsheets, such as those included in LibreOffice and OpenOffice.