Abstract
This paper develops a new heuristic, the Excursion Algorithm(EA), for constructing optimal designs for the experiments related with marine environment. The proposed EA consists of three parts: 1) construction of an initial feasible solution, 2) excursions over a bounded region, and 3) stopping rules. It is the second part that distinguishes the EA from the other existing heuristic methods. It turns out that excursions over a bounded feasible and/or infeasible region is effective in alleviating the risks of being trapped at a local optimum. Since this problem is formulated for the first time thesis, other heuristic algorithms do not exist. Therefore, global optimal solutions are obtained by complete enumeration for some cases, and the performance of the EA is evaluated in terms of solution quality. Computational results show that the proposed EA is effective in finding good(or, in many cases, global) solutions to the constrained optimal experimental design problems.