Partially orthogonal blocked three-level response surface designs

When fitting second-order response surface models in a hypercuboidal region of experimentation, the variance matrices of $D$-optimal continuous designs have a particularly attractive structure, as do many regular unblocked exact designs. Methods for constructing blocked exact designs which preserve this structure and are orthogonal, or nearly orthogonal, are developed. Partially orthogonal designs are built using a small irregular fraction of a two- or three-level design and a regular fractional factorial design as building blocks. Results are derived which relate the properties of the blocked design to these components. Moreover, it is shown how the designs can be augmented to ensure that the model can be fitted and a method for constructing designs with small blocks is presented. Examples illustrate that partially orthogonal designs can compete with more traditional designs in terms of both efficiency and overall size of the experiment.