Abstract
Robust Design(RD) is a cost-effective methodology to determine the optimal settings of control factors that make a product performance insensitive to the influence of noise factors. To better facilitate the robust design optimization, a dual response surface approach, which models both the process mean and standard deviation as separate response surfaces, has been successfully accepted by researchers and practitioners. However, the construction of response surface approximations has been limited to problems with only a few variables, mainly due to an excessive number of experimental runs necessary to fit sufficiently accurate models. In this regard, an innovative response surface approach has been proposed to investigate robust design optimization problems with larger number of variables. Response surfaces for process mean and standard deviation are partitioned and estimated based on the multi-level approximation method, which may reduce the number of experimental runs necessary for fitting response surface models to a great extent. The applicability and usefulness of proposed approach have been demonstrated through an illustrative example.