Solutions for Industrial Formulators

Trying to optimize an existing formulation? or having to develop a brand new one, for example to meet new environmental constraints? Our software can help, provided you have some experimental data to work with. Puzzled about which experiments you should do? Then our 'experimental design' strategies, in FormData, can help.

Our solutions can also highlight whether you are collecting the right information - for example, if no cause-and-effect model can be built, then there is likely to be an uncontrolled variable that is affecting your results. This can be valuable information if you are seeking to produce reliable high-quality products.

Optimizing Existing Formulations

Are you are looking for specific properties to meet specific customer needs, or trying to see if you can reduce cost without affecting performance? If so, INForm is for you. INForm can 'learn' models from your data. Once you have these models, you just specify what values or ranges you want the properties to have, and the relative importance of each of the properties. INForm's inbuilt optimization then finds the formulation that will best meet your criteria.

Modeling and Optimization

Modeling alone is not sufficient to solve this problem - you need to have optimization techniques integrated with the models. INForm brings you this combination, bundled with simple visualization and statistical tools that are useful in assessing the quality of your model.

You can also specify your own property models, provided they can be expressed in simple mathematical form, so that the optimization can use these mathematical expressions as well as the neural network models discovered from your data.

INForm has been used in a variety of industries. Because it works with your own data, it is very versatile.

Developing New Formulations

Some of the biggest challenges can arise when you need to make drastic changes to a formulation, or venture into a new formulation area. You need to understand the underlying relationships between your formulation variables and end-use properties quickly. FormRules can help here - its data mining capabilities can find which ingredients and process conditions are most important for determining each of the properties, so you'll have immediate guidance on where to focus your efforts. The results are presented both graphically, and as simple actionable IF...THEN rules that help you to decide where your next experiments should be undertaken.

Questions?

Don't hesitate to contact us for more information.