Pairwise balanced designs from finite fields Original Research Article

Developing previous work by R.C. Bose, R.M. Wilson, M. Greig and the author, we give a general construction for difference families over finite fields. All the DFs constructed before were generated by a single initial base block so that they were uniform. Here we also consider DFs generated by two or more initial base blocks. These DFs give rise to pairwise balanced designs which of course are balanced block designs exactly when the initial base blocks have constant size.