1.
In your opinion - how successful was your teams efforts at designing and performing this
assignment? Was it a satisfice, an optimization, or not quite what you had hoped?
The team efforts were successful enough to design and perform the exploratory DOE to come
up with the best possible combination of low carbon and traditional energy sources and levels
to meet the energy, emission and cost requirements. It was a satisfice team effort in my
opinion.
2. Which part(s) of the team project did you work on? How did that work out for you?
I initially came up with the project idea and the US government website where we can
collect and analyze the data for exploratory DOE. I came up with the idea of blocking the
data into 5 regions for the ease of categorizing the huge data. I worked on characterizing the
process to better portray our exploration. I designed the 3 factor 3 level fractional factorial
design. I worked on response surface methodology in Minitab 17 to define each of the 3
responses as a function of its 2 factors respectively. In the end, I contributed as part of team,
to come up with the best possible combination of energy sources and levels to meet the
energy, emission and cost requirements.
3. What part(s) of the project interested you the most? Did you have time to explore the
areas of highest personal interest?
Exploring why the total amount of energy generation from all sources in all five regions is
not meeting the energy requirements is the most interesting part for me in this project. I got
a chance to study many web articles and current issues of USAs energy dependence. This is
a good field to explore more in the future and a potential new business solution for a start-
up, in my opinion.
4. What is the single biggest lesson youve learned from working on the team project?
The biggest lessons I learnt from this are project time plan - meeting timelines to complete
each task on time and the importance of getting right work done, the first time.
We, like many other teams, had issues on time management as all the team members of my
group are working professionals on their own tight schedules; but through co-operation and
team work, we could finally meet deadlines.
Getting things done, right first time is very crucial especially when project is on tight
timelines. This project taught me this lesson as well.
5. What were the biggest surprises for you in working on this assignment?
The biggest surprise for me is again USAs huge energy dependence on other countries. The
fact that the huge chunk of its energy needs are met from energy imports is really very
surprising, especially when the country is full with its huge natural resources and its
advanced technology to tap those resources. I think that there is an immediate need to look
into this issue and come up with ideal environment friendly solutions not only to be energy
independent but also to mitigate abrupt climate changes across the country.
6. What was the most difficult part of this assignment for you and your team?
The most difficult part was time management for me and my team. This is because everyone
in my team is a working professional on tight work schedules, taking multiple courses. So
meeting timelines was a bit difficult, but we managed to pull it through at the end.
7. Did you learn anything from this exercise that you would change in a future experiment?
Please explain, and suggest specific steps that might increase your efficiency and accuracy,
and lower costs. Again - think FBC (faster, better, cheaper).
Yes, I would definitely like to explore different levels of our factors, just to see if we can
observe any different results. I would also like to revisit our cost analysis and future pricing
trends to see if we can come up with a cheaper combination that better meets energy and
emission requirements.
8. How would you suggest organizing a team in industry to perform DOE work like your team
just completed this exercise? What could be done differently to improve team
performance?
I think the entire team should understand the importance and objective of the project. The
team must collectively be able to come up with a common project task structure and
timelines. Each member must take responsibility for his/her actions and collectively strive to
achieve better and impressive results within timelines. In my opinion, bringing together a
team of like-minded and co-operating individuals can always bring success to a project.
9. Have your perceptions of the DOE tools changed since the first meeting this semester?
What is your current opinion of DOE tools and their usefulness?
Yes, definitely my perception on DOE tools has changed. I got to know the importance and
function of tools that I worked on, during this project. Though our project is short, it really
gave me the practical application side of these DOE tools. I wish to further explore and learn
more about various DOE tools in the future, which are very useful for statistical analysis and
experimental design and analysis in practical world.
10. How do you think the course material might be used by you in the future? Do you have
any final thoughts or comments on the team project? Please write a summary paragraph
to wrap up your report.
This project could be used in the future to further explore the energy data of coming years
and to extrapolate future trends. Different levels and factors could be used. A full factorial
experiment could be designed. Cost generation and energy requirements for different
sectors in various regions could be re-visited in the future.
The project of exploratory DOE is a good opportunity for me to analyze the available data, to
decide the task structure of the project, to decide what should be the objective, how to
proceed to achieve results, how to select factors and levels, which tools to use for analysis,
how to interpret the obtained results and how to better present them.
It was also learning on project management, team management skills, communication skills
and presentation and analysis skills. Its a good exercise on time management as well.
Overall, this project is a great opportunity for better learning DOE tools and concepts.
Project Summary:
The main objective of our exploratory DOE is to come up with the best possible combination
of energy sources and levels to meet the energy requirements, emission requirements and
cost of generation in each region of the USA.
Our Area of Interest is to explore the trends of energy consumption of various states in the
US in the year 2011 and their biggest energy sources respectively.
The questions we are trying to answer from this project are :
What is the best combination of energy sources and their levels, to satisfy the
energy requirements of a particular states residential, commercial and industrial
sectors in the year 2012?
What is the best combination of energy sources and their levels which gives out the
least carbon emissions, in order to satisfy the 2050 emission requirements?
What could be the future (extrapolated) pricing trends of the best combination of
energy sources?
Data we analyzed are: energy generation per state, energy consumption per state for
industrial and commercial and residential sectors for year 2011 (most recent data available).
This data can be found online but is from a trusted government source.
We took the entire energy generation and consumption data of the year 2011 and
categorized the data into five blocks (regions of the country) as per population and
geographical proximity. This blocking was essential because the low carbon energy sources
were different in different regions. Thus after blocking, the team got an idea of major energy
sources (factors) of each region and then decided the levels for each factor (energy source)
to further proceed on the factorial design.
We characterized the process to get a clear picture of all factors involved and to decide on
which inputs and outputs to consider. ANOVA on the total emissions of different energy
sources gave a good start for the project which has shown that the emissions of each source
are different.
We proceeded with 3 factor 3 level randomized fractional factorial design to come up with 3
responses for each run energy generated, emissions and cost of generation. Total 20 runs
were done as part of exploratory DOE and all results were tabulated in Minitab 17.
The responses from each run were analyzed in Minitab using response surface methodology
to understand the functional relation between a response and its most influential factors.
Thus we have drawn meaningful conclusion for each response and its influencing factors.
After analyzing the interactions, we came up with the best possible combination of energy
source and levels for each region that satisfies energy, emission and cost requirements.
For the obtained best combination, we used regression techniques to extrapolate the pricing
trends. We obtained future pricing trends and actually shown that our proposed
combination actually results in lower prices in the future (2025).
Thus we concluded that our proposed combinations are best possible solutions as per the
given data to satisfy the given requirements.
Below are some of our project assumptions:
Automobile energy consumption and emissions is out of scope for our project.
Future pricing trends will be obtained by assuming stable geo political and social conditions
in the US and stable tax and inflation rates in various states of the country.
As a summary, the following DOE tools are used for our project:
Characterize the process
Establishing the factors and their levels (energy sources and their % levels)
Blocking and randomizing factors (energy sources of different regions in the US)
Fractional factorial exploratory Design
Come up with the interactions between various factors and levels
Responses (energy generation) and the best possible combination(s)
Anova with hypothesis testing (H0: No difference in the average emissions of
different energy sources)
Regression to extrapolate the future pricing trends
Response Surface methodology to plot the various observed responses.
Data Source: Planned source of data: US Energy Information Administration
at http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.cfm#generation.
U.S. Energy Information Administration at http://www.eia.gov/
Table 8.4. Average Power Plant Operating Expenses for Major U.S. Investor-Owned Electric
Utilities, 2002 through 2012 at http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html
U.S. Energy Information Administration - April 2014 Monthly Energy Review at
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm#naturalgas
Table 7.9 Coal Prices, 1949-2011at
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm#coal
Design and Analysis of Experiments (7th Edition), Douglas C. Montgomery (p.389)
