Robustness of some balanced block designs (Q1802131)

The author has discussed in detail the robustness of balanced incomplete block (BIB) designs, particularly when some observations are missing. The robustness has been surveyed in three directions, namely: (i) in terms of the property of connectedness of parameters, (ii) in terms of variance balancedness of the remaining structure, and (iii) robustness against non-availability of one treatment in terms of efficiency. The author has also vividly discussed locally resistent (LR) and globally resistent (GR) BIB, \((v,b,r,k,\lambda)\) designs of degree \(s\) (\(\leq r- 2\)) treatments. On LR and GR designs, a large number of theorems, lemmas and also corollaries have been given and some of them are also proved with regard to affine-resolvable designs and other BIB designs. Efficiency of designs in case of missing values has been calculated and the upper and lower bounds \(E_{\text{max}}\) and \(E_{\text{min}}\) are obtained in variance balanced designs and otherwise also. The paper is highly informative and result oriented.