Abstract: Nowadays orthogonal arrays play important roles in statistics,computer science, coding theory and cryptography.The usual difference matrices are essential for the con- struction of many mixed orthogonal arrays.But there are also many orthogonal arrays, especially mixed-level or asymmetrical which can not be obtained by the usual difference matrices.In order to construct these asymmetrical orthogonal arrays,a class of special matrices,so-called generalized difference matrices,were discovered by Zhang(1989,1990, 1993) by the orthogonal decompositions of projective matrices.In this article,an interesting equivalent relationship between the orthogonal arrays and the generalized difference matri- ces is presented.As an application,a family of orthogonal arrays of run sizes 4p²,such as L36(6134210),are constructed. 

Key words: mixed-level orthogonal arrays, generalized difference matrices, projective ma- trices; ,  ,  ,  permutable ,  ,  ,  matrices