Estimate of the number and of the temporal sequence of measurements in a kinetic experiment.

The optimal choice of the number and the temporal sequence of measurements is that which minimizes the expected error on the parameters of the model later used to fit the observations. Practical constraints regarding the feasibility of a given temporal distribution of measurements, cost-benefit ratio as well as prior knowledge about the parameters and their variability in the selected population must be integrated in the decisional process. A non-linear integer programming procedure is used to find reasonable solutions to this problem.