The Use of Treatment Concurrences to Assess Robustness of Binary Block Designs Against the Loss of Whole Blocks

Criteria are proposed for assessing the robustness of a binary block design against the loss of whole blocks, based on summing entries of selected upper non‐principal sections of the concurrence matrix. These criteria improve on the minimal concurrence concept that has been used previously and provide new conditions for measuring the robustness status of a design. The robustness properties of two‐associate partially balanced designs are considered and it is shown that two categories of group divisible designs are maximally robust. These results expand a classic result in the literature, obtained by Ghosh, which established maximal robustness for the class of balanced block designs.