In this paper we study the behavior of the fractions of a factorial design under permutations of the factor levels. We focus on the notion of regular fraction and we introduce methods to check whether a given symmetric orthogonal array can or can not be transformed into a regular fraction by means of suitable permutations of the factor levels. The proposed techniques take advantage of the complex coding of the factor levels and of some tools from polynomial algebra. Several examples are described, mainly involving factors with five levels.
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