Nowadays orthogonal arrays play important roles in statistics, computer science, coding theory and cryptography. The usual difference matrices are essential for the construction for many mixed orthogonal arrays. But there are also orthogonal arrays which cannot be obtained by the usual difference matrices, such as mixed orthogonal arrays of run size 60. In order to construct these mixed orthogonal arrays, a class of special so-called generalized difference matrices were discovered by Zhang (1989,1990,1993,2006) from the orthogonal decompositions of projection matrices. In this article, an interesting equivalent relationship between orthogonal arrays and the generalized difference matrices is presented and proved. As an application, a lot of new orthogonal arrays of run size 60 have been constructed.
