Blocking Schemes for Definitive Screening Designs

As originally presented, these designs are three-level designs for quantitative factors that provide estimates of main effects that are unbiased by any second-order effect and require only one more than twice as many runs as there are factors. Definitive screening designs avoid direct confounding of any pair of second-order effects, and, for designs that have more than five factors, project to efficient response surface designs for any two or three factors.

Recently, Jones and Nachtsheim (2013) expanded the applicability of these designs by showing how to include any number of two-level categorical factors. However, methods for blocking definitive screening designs have not been addressed. In this paper we develop orthogonal blocking schemes for definitive screening designs.