General balance and treatment permutations (Q2277725)

Generally balanced designs are among the most commonly used designs in planned experiments. The authors show that certain symmetry conditions on the design imply general balance and consequently certain methods of construction will always result in generally balanced designs. Section 2 of the paper introduces the concept of general balance. Only equireplicate designs are considered. Tjur block systems and Tjur designs are reviewed. Section 3 discusses the role that groups of symmetries play on the structure of designs, and gives some examples. Section 4 focuses on one of the most common ways of constructing designs, viz., specification of one or more initial blocks and generation of further blocks by applying a group of permutations to the initial blocks. Section 5 studies conditions on G that guarantee general balance of G-central designs. Section 6 reviews some character theory for Abelian groups. In Section 7 it is shown that every Abelian group design is generally balanced with respect to its homogeneous decomposition. Some examples are given to illustrate the results.