Definitive screening designs (DSDs), have three levels, provide estimates of main effects that are unbiased by any second-order effect, require only one more than twice as many runs as there are factors and avoid confounding of any pair of second-order effects.
For designs having six factors or more, these designs project to efficient response surface designs with three or fewer factors. A limitation of these designs is that all factors must be quantitative.
In this article, reprinted with permission from the Journal of Quality Technology, DSD inventors Bradley Jones and Chris Nachtsheim show column-augmented DSDs that can accommodate any number of two-level qualitative factors using two methods.