Kirti R. Shah

In the early nineties, at the initiative of Sinha and financial support of Shah and Liski (from their respective Research Project Funds), the authors - inspired by their similar research interests - started collaborative research at various institutions mostly in pairs and triplets. It took more time and efforts on the part of MandaI to visit the others at regular intervals and keep track of their common as well as diverse research areas and merge his own. From this collaborative work, the concept of this monograph took a preliminary shape only last year and serious efforts were started to combine diverse avenues into one. Admittedly, it took more time than expected to converge to a common platform regarding the contents and broad coverage of the topics to be included. We were mostly guided by our own common research interests spanning over the last ten years. That covered optimal designs in both discrete and continuous settings. Availability of huge published literature in various statistical journals on the broad theme of optimal designs has made our task quite interesting and stimulating. We hope our readers will be as excited and delighted to read the monograph as we have been in our efforts to write it.

There has been an enormous growth in recent years in the literature on discrete optimal designs. The optimality problems have been formulated in various models arising in the experimental designs and substantial progress has been made towards solving some of these. The subject has now reached a stage of completeness which calls for a self-contained monograph on this topic. The aim of this monograph is to present the state of the art and to focus on more recent advances in this rapidly developing area. We start with a discussion of statistical optimality criteria in Chapter One. Chapters Two and Three deal with optimal block designs. Row-column designs are dealt with in Chapter Four. In Chapter Five we deal with optimal designs with mixed effects models. Repeated measurement designs are considered in Chapter Six. Chapter Seven deals with some special situations and Weighing designs are dis­ cussed in Chapter Eight. We have endeavoured to include all the major developments that have taken place in the last three decades. The book should be of use to research workers in several areas including combinatorics as well as to the experimenters in diverse fields of applications. Since the details of the construction of the designs are available in excellent books, we have only pointed out the designs which have optimality proper­ ties. We believe, this will be adequate for the experimenters.