pRepDesigns

Abstract

Early generation breeding trials are to be conducted in multiple environments where it may not be possible to replicate all the lines in each environment due to scarcity of resources. For such situations, partially replicated (p-Rep) designs have wide application potential as only a proportion of the test lines are replicated at each environment. A collection of several utility functions related to p-Rep designs have been developed. Here, the package contains four functions for a complete stepwise analytical study of these designs. Three functions pRep1(), pRep2() and pRep3() are used to generate three new series of p-Rep designs and also compute canonical efficiency factors, variance factors between associates and average variance factors of these designs. A fourth function NCEV() is used to generate incidence matrix (N), information matrix (C), canonical efficiency factor (E) and average variance factor (V). This function is general in nature and can be used for studying the characterization properties of any block design. A construction procedure for p-Rep designs was given by Williams et al.(2011) which was tidious and time consuming. Here, in this package, three different methods have been given to generate p-Rep designs easily.