George Box and Robust Design

George Box's pioneering research in experimental design has impacted many scientific and engineering disciplines. The research was often motivated by the real‐world problems of scientists and engineers. His research in robust design was motivated by engineering applications identified by Genichi Taguchi, that of designing a product or process that is insensitive to environmental conditions and to variation from components. George Box acknowledged the important contribution that Taguchi made in showing the value of the engineering concept of robust design in the design of industrial products and process, for realizing the potential of design of experiments as a methodology to identify robust product designs and for convincing engineers to run these experiments. George Box recognized that there were opportunities to improve on the design and analysis of experiments methods that Taguchi advocated for robust design. In this paper, we focus on his research in three areas of robust design: (i) experimental design methods for designing products robust to environmental variation; (ii) designing products robust to transmitted variation from components; and (iii) analysis methods for robust design experiments. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.