Construction of Balanced Sampling Plans Excluding Adjacent Units

Abstract

Balanced sampling plans excluding adjacent units are useful for sampling from populations in which the nearer units provide similar observations due to natural ordering of the units in time or space. The ordering of units in the population may be circular or linear. For these plans, all the first order inclusion probabilities are equal whereas second order inclusion probabilities for pairs of adjacent units at a distance less than or equal to α are zero and constant for all other pairs of non-adjacent units which are at a distance greater than α. In this article, we present 13 new balanced sampling plans excluding adjacent units for one dimensional population with circular and 111 with linear ordering of units in the parametric range N <= 50, n <= 7, λ <=7, α <=5.