Hi @Mathej01,
It sounds like you want to have "forced runs" in your design more than using a Candidate set approach, which requires a table with all possible experimental combinations runs in which the Custom Design platform may pick the most informative runs regarding the model you want to investigate.
The Augment Design platform may be a suitable choice for your use case. I totally understand your choice to include formulations already done, and the Augment Design platform is completely able to handle the information from these initial runs and provide new runs that help complete the information needed by the model you specify.
In the toy dataset that I provide, you can test your use case by augmenting the 4 initial runs into a design (checking the "Group new runs into separate block" may be a good idea to evaluate any variability change between the initial and augmented set of experiments), specify the model you want and the number of runs in total (for example 15 runs including the 4 initial runs). In the example provided, you can specify a Scheffe Cubic model (with the blocking enabled) and have a design proposal with 15 runs, so it does make sense.
The efficiency of the design is linked to various paremeters, such as the number of runs you can afford, information brought by your initial runs (repartition of the points in your experimental space), complexity of the model you assume...
So there might be no definitive answer to your question, the best thing to do is to try different scenario (design generated by augmenting initial runs or design generated from scratch) and compare the designs obtained through the "Compare Design" platform.
You will have a better overview of the potential benefits of augmenting a design, since the 4 initial runs are already done, so that means you may compare a 15-runs augmented mixture design to a 11-runs mixture design from scratch (if you can't afford more runs), and benefit from this additional information to have better precision in terms estimation, better predictive performances and/or the possibility to assume a more complex model.
Hope this answer helps you,
Victor GUILLER
L'Oréal Data & Analytics
"It is not unusual for a well-designed experiment to analyze itself" (Box, Hunter and Hunter)