Supersaturated designs for robustness testing

Supersaturated designs are factorial designs in which the number of factors examined exceeds the number of experiments performed. They do not allow an estimation of individual effects, since even the main effects are confounded. However, the total variance of a response estimated from such a design can in principle be used as a measure for the robustness of the method. A number of case studies were examined to determine whether the variance estimated from a supersaturated design is similar to the one from a Plackett-Burman design. This was found to be the case, which means that the estimated variance describes well the variation in the response caused by the variation in the factors.