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ABSTRACT
A balanced sampling plan excluding contiguous units (or BSEC for short) was first introduced by Hedayat, Rao and Stufken in 1988. These designs can be used for survey sampling when the units are arranged in one-dimensional ordering and the contiguous units in this ordering provide similar information. In this paper, we generalize the concept of a BSEC to the two-dimensional situation and give constructions of two-dimensional BSECs with block size 3. The existence problem is completely solved in the case where λ = 1.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank the referees for their helpful comments. Research in this paper is supported by TRAPOYT and NSF of China grant No. 10071002 (Y. Chang), by ONR grant N00014-97-1-1067 (C. Rodger), and by NSERC grant 239135-01 (R. Wei). C. Rodger thanks the University of Newcastle for providing a fertile research environment during his sabbatical leave from Auburn University.