Summing multilinear operators by blocks: the isotropic and anisotropic cases

Unifying several directions of the development of the study of summing multilinear operators between Banach spaces, we construct a general framework that studies, under one single definition, multilinear operators that are summing with respect to sums taken over any number of indices, iterated and non-iterated sums (the isotropic and the anisotropic cases), sums over arbitrary blocks and over several different sequence norms. A large number of special classes of multilinear operators and of methods of generating classes of multilinear operators are recovered as particular instances. Ideal properties and coincidence theorems for the general classes are proved.