What is a Plackett-Burman design?

Plackett-Burman designs are a class of resolution III, two-level factorial designs that are often used to study main effects. In a resolution III design, main effects are aliased with two-way interactions.

Minitab creates Plackett-Burman designs for up to 47 factors. Each design is based on the number of runs, from 12 to 48 and always a multiple of 4. The number of factors must be less than the number of runs.