Pyomo.DoE refactor: Development plan for remaining functionality upgrades and future vision

[djlaky]

Summary

The purpose of this meta issue is to track our development plans for Pyomo.DoE after the refactor (August 2024 release). This combines the remaining issues from #2610

Changes

Immediate functionality upgrades (Fall 2024):

• Move Enum definition to the User side
• Trim input attribute list for DesignOfExperiments constructor (e.g., push some to get/set functions)
• Allow user-defined models --> Add safe naming conventions as to not overwrite existing features
• Add check for objective functions on user-defined models when running compute_FIM
• Safeguard solver calls to check if results can load into the model --> Display verbose error for users
• Reformulate results dictionary to be less fragile
• Add metadata, other useful data to the results
• Make error messages on solver failures more verbose
• Overhaul sensitivity plotting functionality to avoid using strings
• Improve plotting functionalities to include more than 2 design variables (pairwise heatmaps)

Cross-functionality requirements to make parmest and pyomo.DoE more compatible (Fall 2024):

• Allow Param types for unknown_parameters and experiment_inputs (automatically change into Var types)
• Add an update function for unknown_parameters values (Allows optimal DoE without rebuilding the whole model from scratch)

Future Features (Spring 2025 and beyond):

• Allow initialization for finite difference model instances using ‘kaug’
• Generalize measurement variance to consider correlations (not just diagonal)
• Add more objective types (e.g., modified E-opt, G-opt, V-opt, etc.)
• Add grey box objective function calculation (possibly required for some of the above objective functions)
• Add optimal multi-experiment decision-making (simultaneous or sequential optimization for batches of experiments)
• Support decomposition with parapint