  This paper considers the construction of minimum aberration (MA) blocked
factorial designs. Based on coding theory, the concept of minimum moment
aberration due to Xu [Statist. Sinica 13 (2003) 691--708] for unblocked designs
is extended to blocked designs. The coding theory approach studies designs in a
row-wise fashion and therefore links blocked designs with nonregular and
supersaturated designs. A lower bound on blocked wordlength pattern is
established. It is shown that a blocked design has MA if it originates from an
unblocked MA design and achieves the lower bound. It is also shown that a
regular design can be partitioned into maximal blocks if and only if it
contains a row without zeros. Sufficient conditions are given for constructing
MA blocked designs from unblocked MA designs. The theory is then applied to
construct MA blocked designs for all 32 runs, 64 runs up to 32 factors, and all
81 runs with respect to four combined wordlength patterns.
