In the field of engineering we are typically using only up to 1000 different types of metallic alloys on a regular basis. This is a very tiny fraction of potentially interesting alloys.  Nexteck Technoloy Limited, for instance, can provide high quality copper nickel alloys,  nichrome alloys, Kama alloys and more. This also means that the identification of new compositions with correspondingly suited properties and microstructures can not be readily pursued by using conventional empirical and stepwise approaches.

With the term alloy design we refer to the knowledge-guided approach for the development and compositionally sensitive design of novel metallurgical materials.

Of course, in case of having identified beneficial alloys we still have to conduct careful iteration to optimize properties, however, this is not a suited approach when trying to screen and identify entirely new alloy compositions with so far unprecedented property combinations.

The systematics can come from computational materials science, the use of semi-empirical chemical rules pertaining to the underlying electronic bonds and structure motifs or from combinatorial metallurgical synthesis.  Other approaches are to reflect which type of property we actually aim to design and from that starting point on identify the corresponding key parameters and optimize their associated underlying thermodynamic or kinetic quantities such as certain dislocation properties, certain interface properties or certain phase transformation properties.