There has been much recent interest in supersaturated designs and their application in factor screening experiments. Supersaturated designs have mainly been constructed by using the E s 2 -optimality criterion originally proposed by Booth and Cox in 1962. However, until now E (s 2 )optimal designs have only been established with certainty for n experimental runs when the number of factors m is a multiple of n À 1, and in adjacent cases where m q(n À 1) r (jr j 4 2, q an integer). A method of constructing E (s 2 )-optimal designs is presented which allows a reasonably complete solution to be found for various numbers of runs n including n 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 40, 48, 64.