Construction of balanced sliced orthogonal arrays.

Balanced sliced orthogonal arrays (BSOAs) are useful for designing sliced computer experiments with qualitative and quantitative factors or multiple models and nested computer experiments with two codes of different levels of accuracy. In this article, we propose a systematic method to construct BSOAs by making use of the A + B design structure and its modifications. A general method for construction of asymmetric BSOAs is also presented based on an orthogonal array with orthogonal partition. These methods are flexible for strength and factors. Numerous new symmetric and asymmetric BSOAs including a lot of ones with high strength can thus be constructed. Compared with the existing BSOAs, the constructed BSOAs have more number of columns. Moreover, these methods can also be used to construct BSOAs whose strength is different from the strength of their slices. Some selective BSOAs are tabulated for practical uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]