Minimum aberration blocking schemes for two- and three-level fractional factorial designs

The concept of minimum aberration has been extended to choose blocked fractional factorial designs (FFDs). The minimum aberration criterion ranks blocked FFDs according to their treatment and block wordlength patterns, which are often obtained by counting words in the treatment defining contrast subgroups and alias sets. When the number of factors is large, there are a huge number of words to be counted, causing some difficulties in computation. Based on coding theory, the concept of minimum moment aberration, proposed by Xu [Statist. Sinica, 13 (2003) 691-708] for unblocked FFDs, is extended to blocked FFDs. A method is then proposed for constructing minimum aberration blocked FFDs without using defining contrast subgroups and alias sets. Minimum aberration blocked FFDs for all 32 runs, 64 runs up to 32 factors, and all 81 runs are given with respect to three combined wordlength patterns. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.