Construction of resolvable row-column designs based on contractions

Abstract

This paper defines the contraction of a resolvable row-column design for more than two replicates. It shows that the (M,S)-optimality criterion for the row-column designs can be expressed simply in terms of the elements of the row and column incidence matrices of the contraction. This allows the development of a very fast algorithm to construct optimal or near-optimal resolvable row-column designs. The performance of such an algorithm is compared with an existing algorithm.