Graphical matroid for causality assignment in bond graphs (Q1963944)

The paper deals with the structural analysis of dynamical systems modeled by bond graphs. The authors use matroid theory as a method. After a brief introduction into matroids, Section 3 describes how every result in bond graph theory can be translated into matroid theory. In fact, for every dynamical system represented by a bond graph two corresponding matroids are defined. Section 4 contains the main result of the paper, which is a greedy algorithm that constructs cycle and co-cycle graphs from graphical matroids defined in the previous section. The algorithm fails if the matroid is not graphic as shown in Example 2. The validity of this procedure is verified in Section 5. Section 6 provides two explicit examples where the main result is applied.