Design & Analysis of Screening Experiments
Select the 2-level screening (Plackett-Burman) designs option from the Advanced tab of the Design and Analysis of Experiments Startup Panel to display the Design & Analysis of Screening Experiments dialog. This dialog contains two tabs: Design experiment and Analyze design.
Note: Designs. When you need to screen a large number of factors to identify those that may be important (i.e., those that are related to the dependent variable of interest), you need to employ a design that allows you to test the largest number of factor main effects with the least number of observations, that is to construct a resolution III design with as few runs as possible. One way to design such experiments is to confound all interactions with "new" main effects. Such designs are also sometimes called saturated designs, because all information in those designs is used to estimate the parameters, leaving no degrees of freedom to estimate the error term for the ANOVA. Because the added factors are created by equating (aliasing), the "new" factors with the interactions of a full factorial design, these designs always will have 2k runs (e.g., 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on).
Plackett and Burman (1946) showed how full factorial designs can be fractionalized in a different manner, to yield saturated designs where the number of runs is a multiple of 4, rather than a power of 2. These designs are also sometimes call Hadamard matrix designs.