Point-weight designs. Click here to go back to the research page. Click here to go back to the main page.

Definition A point-weight incidence structure is an incidence structure where every point is associated with an positive integer weight. Formally, a point-weight design is a quadruple (V,B,I,w) where (V,B,I) is an incidence structure and w is a map from the set of points V into the positive integers.

Here

         V={P1,P2,P3,P4}
         B={B1,B2,B3,B4}

and

         w(P1)=1          w(P2)=1          w(P3)=1          w(P4)=2
         A point-weight design is an extension of the idea of a design into a point-weight incidence structure. A point-weight design is characterised by two conditions: the constant block size condition and the design condition. In a classical design the constant block size condition is "every block must contain exactly k points" and this easily generalises to point-weight incidence structures. We will require that "the sum of the weights of the points on a block is constant". Notice that the above point-weight incidence structure has the constant block size property as the sum of the weights on any block is 3.

         The constant block size condition is quite obvious but there is more than one consistant definition of the design condition. (By "consistant" we mean that if some structure is a point-weight design where all the points are the same weight then it is essentially a classical design). The most obvious is a design condition that has any t points lie on exactly l blocks. A point-weight incidence structure that satisfies both this design condition and the constant block size condition is called a point-sum point-weight design and is dealt with extensively in the PhD thesis of Richard Horne (here). The above is a example is a point-sum design for t=2 and l=1.

         Another design condition, proposed by Tracey Powlesland in her thesis, is that every set of points whose weights add up to t should lie on exactly l blocks. A point-weight incidence structure that satisfies both this design condition and the constant block size condition is called a weight-sum point-weight design. The above example is, rather trivially, a weight-sum design for t=3 and l=1. Weight-sum designs have applications to secret sharing schemes and are therefore the most difficult type of point-weight design for which to derive abstract results!

         The last studied design condition was studied in my thesis (here). If S is a set of t points then these points are incident with exactly
the product of l/w(x) over all x in S.
This somewhat bizarre design condition gives rise to certain desirable properties of the incidence matrix of the design. We a point-weight incidence structure that satisfies both this design condition and the constant block size condition is called a row-sum point-weight design. The design on the right is an example of a row-sum design for t=2 and l=4.


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