Patent ID: 7991593

Claim:
A method of optimising a manufacturing, industrial or engineering sequential combinatorial process comprising a plurality of interchangeable events performable in any of many sequences to achieve an end result of the process, the end result being defined by an operation parameter, wherein the method is implemented at least in part by a computer, and wherein said operation parameter for a particular sequence is dependent on how the interchangeable events for said sequence are ordered, the method comprising: using a design of experiments comprising a plurality of sequences selected from the many sequences of interchangeable performable events, each sequence from the design of experiments being linked to information regarding values of contributions to the end result, in terms of the operation parameter, for each event in each sequence; using a surrogate model of the process that takes as an input a sequence of the events and determines a value of the end result by summing values of contributions to the end result for each event in the input sequence, where the values of the contributions are selected from the values of the contributions from the operation parameter information according to an algorithm that searches the design of experiments for a match between each event of the input sequence and the events in the sequences of the design of experiments according to a priority list of matching conditions and retrieves the value of the contribution for the matched event; running a plurality of the many sequences through the surrogate model and recording the value of the end result for each sequence; and identifying an optimum sequence by searching the recorded values of the end result from the surrogate model to find a recorded optimum value of the operation parameter, the sequence that gives this recorded optimum value being the optimum sequence.