A new approach in constructing orthogonal and nearly orthogonal arrays

Orthogonal arrays have been constructed by a number of mathematical tools such as orthogonal Latin squares, Hadamard matrices, group theory and finite fields. Wang and Wu (1992) proposed the concept of a nearly orthogonal array and found a number of such arrays with high efficiency. In this paper we propose some criteria for non-orthogonality and two algorithms for the construction of orthogonal and nearly orthogonal arrays evincing higher efficiency than that obtained by Wang and Wu.