Handcuffed designs

Handcuffed designs are a particular case of block designs on graphs. A handcuffed design with parameters v, k, λ consists of a system of ordered k-subsets of a v-set, called handcuffed blocks. In a block {A₁, A₂,…, A_k} each element is assumed to be handcuffed to its neighbors and the block contains k ? 1 handcuffed pairs (A₁, A₂), (A₂, A₁), …, (A_k?1, A_k). These pairs are considered unordered. The collection of handcuffed blocks constitutes a handcuffed design if the following are satisfied: (1) each element of the v-set appears amongst the blocks the same number of times (and at most once in a block) and (2) each pair of distinct elements of the v-set are handcuffed in exactly λ of the blocks. If the total number of blocks is b and each element appears in r blocks the following conditions are necessary for the handcuffed design to exist. (1) λv (v ? 1) = (k ? 1)b. (2) rv = kb. In this paper it is shown that the necessary conditions are also sufficient.