The Existence of Partitioned Generalized Balanced Tournament Designs with Block Size 3

A generalized balanced tournament design, GBTD(n, k), defined on a kn-set V, is an arrangement of the blocks of a (kn, k, k – 1)-BIBD defined on V into an n × (kn – 1) array such that (1) every element of V is contained in precisely one cell of each column, and (2) every element of V is contained in at most k cells of each row. Suppose we can partition the columns of a GBTD(n, k) into k + 1 sets B1, B2,..., Bk + 1 where |Bi| = n for i = 1, 2,..., k – 2, |Bi| = n–1 for i = k – 1, k and |Bk+1| = 1 such that (1) every element of V occurs precisely once in each row and column of Bi for i = 1, 2,..., k – 2, and (2) every element of V occurs precisely once in each row and column of Bi Bk+1 for i = k – 1 and i = k. Then the GBTD(n, k) is called partitioned and we denote the design by PGBTD(n, k). The spectrum of GBTD(n, 3) has been completely determined. In this paper, we determine the spectrum of PGBTD(n,3) with, at present, a fairly small number of exceptions for n. This result is then used to establish the existence of a class of Kirkman squares in diagonal form.