We present a new anisotropic $hp$-adaptive technique, which can be employed for the numerical solution of various scientific and engineering problems governed by partial differential equations in 2D with the aid of a discontinuous piecewise polynomial approximation. This method generates anisotropic triangular grids and the corresponding polynomial approximation degrees based on the minimization of the interpolation error in the $L^q$-norm.
We develop the theoretical background of this approach and present several numerical examples demonstrating the efficiency of the anisotropic adaptive strategy.