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2 Auxiliary Designs
In order to establish our main result, we shall employ both direct and recursive constructions. In
this section, we shall define some terminology and describe some of the auxiliary designs to be
used in our constructions. For more detailed information on some of these related combinatorial
structures, the reader is referred to [41].
Let DK
n
1
,n
2
,...,n
h
be the complete multipartite directed graph with vertex set X = ∪
1≤i≤h
X
i
,
where X
i
(1 ≤ i ≤ h) are disjoint sets with |X
i
| = n
i
, v = Σ
1≤i≤h
n
i
, and where two vertices x
and y from different sets X
i
and X
j
are joined by exactly one arc from x to y and one arc from
y to x.
Let K be a set of positive integers and r < min{k : k ∈ K}. An r-fold perfect holey Mendelsohn
design (or r-fold perfect HMD) with block size in K is an order pair (X, A) where A is a set
of cyclically ordered subsets of X, called blocks, which form an arc-disjoint decomposition of
DK
n
1
,n
2
,...,n
h
with the property that for any integer t (1 ≤ t ≤ r) and any two vertices x and y
from different sets X
i
and X
j
, there is exactly one circuit c ∈ A such that the directed distance
along c from x to y is r. Each X
i
(1 ≤ i ≤ h) is called a hole (or group) of the design and the
multiset {n
1
, n
2
, . . . , n
h
} is called the type of the design. We denote the design by r-fold perfect
(v, K, 1)-HMD (or r-fold perfect K-HMD) and use an “exponential” notation to describe its type
in general: a type 1
i
2
r
3
k
. . . denotes i occurrences of 1 , r occurrences of 2, etc.
If K = {k} and r = k − 1, then an r-fold perfect (v, {k}, 1)-HMD is briefly denoted by
(v, k, 1)-HPMD (or k-HPMD).
A (v, k, 1)-HPMD of type 1
v
is essentially a (v, k, 1)-PMD. A (v, k, 1)-HPMD of type 1
v −n
n
1
is called an incomplete a perfect Mendelsohn design, denoted by (v, n, k, 1)-IPMD or more briefly
by k-IPMD(v, n).
We shall also make use of the concept of a holey Steiner pentagon system.
Let S be a set and H={S
1
, S
2
, . . . , S
n
} be a set of subsets of S. A holey Steiner pentagon
system (HSPS) having hole set H is a triple (S,H,B) where B is collection of pentagons, satisfying
the following properties:
1. Two vertices from same hole S
i
do not occur together in any pentagon of B,
2. two vertices from different holes S
i
and S
j
(i 6= j) are joined by a path of length 1 in exactly
one pentagon of B, and also by a path of length 2 in exactly one pentagon of B.
It is fairly well-known that the existence of a holey Steiner pentagon system (HSPS) of type
T implies the existence of a 5-HPMD of the same type T (see, for example, [17], and we shall
make good use of this association.
The following existence results for 5-HPMDs and 5-IPMDs will be very useful. Note that the
existence of a 5-HPMD of type 5
6
is essentially established in Lemma 3.2 of [5] in the form of
what is described as a 5-FPMD, and this was inadvertently omitted from the update given in
[10].
Theorem 2.1.
[17, 10, 5] The necessary condition for the existence of a 5-HPMD of type h
n
,
namely, n ≥ 5 and n(n − 1)h
2
≡ 0 (mod 5), is also sufficient, except possibly for the following
cases:
(1)
h ≡ 1, 3, 7 or 9 (mod 10), h 6= 3, and n ∈ {6, 10, 20};
(2)
h ∈ { 1, 13, 17, 19} and n = 15;
4
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