In manufacturing industry, finding optimal design parameters for targeted properties has traditionally been
guided by trial and error. However, limited data availability to few hundreds sets of experimental data in typical
materials processes, the machine-learning capabilities and other data-driven modeling (DDM) techniques are too
far from it to be practical. In this study, we show how a versatile design strategy, tightly coupled with physics-
based modeling (PBM) data, can be applied to small set of experimental data to improve the optimization of
process parameters. Our strategy uses PBM to achieve augmented data that includes essential physics: in other
words, the PBM data allows the inverse design model to ¡®learn¡¯ physics, indirectly. We demonstrated the ac-
curacy of both forward-prediction and inverse-optimization have been dramatically improved with the help of
PBM data, which are relatively cheap and abundant. Furthermore, we found that the inverse model with
augmented data can accurately optimize process parameters, even for ones those were not considered in the
simulation. Such versatile strategy can be helpful for processes/experiments for the cases where the number of
collectable data is limited, which is most of the case in industries.