Various criteria have been proposed to compare and assess fractional factorial designs. Among them the minimum moment aberration criterion is conceptually simple and computationally cheap. However, the power moments in the minimum moment aberration criterion depend on the Hamming distances between two runs, which leads to minimum moment aberration criterion having a few defects. In this paper, we use Lee distance instead of Hamming distance to de ne power moments, and propose the minimum Lee-moment aberration criterion to compare and assess multi-level fractional factorial designs. Some relationships between minimum Lee-moment aberration criterion and other criteria are also studied, which provides a signi cant statistical justi cation of minimum Lee-moment aberration criterion.