Balanced incomplete Latin square designs

• A new class of designs called balanced incomplete Latin squares (BILS) is proposed.
• A general method for constructing BILS is proposed.
• The application of a BILS design on a practical experiment is given.
• The optimality of the delete-one-transversal BILS designs among all designs is investigated.

Latin squares have been widely used to design an experiment where the blocking factors and treatment factors have the same number of levels. For some experiments, the size of blocks may be less than the number of treatments. Since not all the treatments can be compared within each block, a new class of designs called balanced incomplete Latin squares (BILS) is proposed. A general method for constructing BILS is proposed by an intelligent selection of certain cells from a complete Latin square via orthogonal Latin squares. The optimality of the proposed BILS designs is investigated. It is shown that the proposed transversal BILS designs are asymptotically optimal for all the row, column and treatment effects. The relative efficiencies of a delete-one-transversal BILS design with respect to the optimal designs for both cases are also derived; it is shown to be close to 100%, as the order becomes large.