choice-metrics.com

Running designs take forever, even simple ones from documentation don't stop.

The algorithms in Ngene are designed to never stop (except for orthogonal designs, which are limited in number), since there are typically billions of combinations to be tried and Ngene "randomly" (in a smart way) selects designs to evaluate. It is up to the user to stop the algorithm and select the best design found. Ngene reports D-errors or other measures, so these measures stabilize you can stop. Alternatively, you can put into your algorithm that you stop the algorithm after X seconds or after X iterations.

The stopping criteria can be specified within the ;alg property using the stop option (full details in the syntax reference in the manual). For very small designs, you may be able to do an exhaustive search by specifying ;alg=all, but in most cases this is not a good approach.