Colourings of uniform group divisible designs and maximum packings

Abstract

A weak ‐colouring of a design is an assignment of colours to its points from a set of available colours, such that there are no monochromatic blocks. A colouring of a design is block‐equitable, if for each block, the number of points coloured with any available pair of colours differ by at most one. Weak and block‐equitable colourings of balanced incomplete block designs have been previously considered. In this paper, we extend these concepts to group divisible designs (GDDs) and packing designs. We first determine when a ‐GDD of type can have a block‐equitable ‐colouring. We then give a direct construction of maximum block‐equitable 2‐colourable packings with block size 4; a recursive construction has previously appeared in the literature. We also generalise a bound given in the literature for the maximum size of block‐equitably 2‐colourable packings to . Furthermore, we establish the asymptotic existence of uniform ‐GDDs with arbitrarily many groups and arbitrary chromatic numbers (with the exception of and ). A structural analysis of 2‐ and 3‐uniform 3‐GDDs obtained from 4‐chromatic STS , where is given. We briefly discuss weak colourings of packings, and finish by considering some further constraints on weak colourings of GDDs, namely, requiring all groups to be either monochromatic or equitably coloured.