Bond graphs. I: Acausal equivalence (Q674444)

There are hundreds of papers about bond-graphs, describing the distribution of the power through a physical system; some of them lacks mathematical precision (or contain plainly incorrect results as well). The authors start a mathematically rigorous study. Two quantities called effort and flow are associated to the edge and their directions determine the so called causality of the bond graph. This is disregarded in the present Part I where acausal equivalence is introduced together with 15 operations which preserve this equivalence. If two bond graphs are equivalent then they are proved to be convertable into each other by a sequence of these operations and their inverses.