Involutive moving frames (Q2305807)

Arnaldsson's paper develops a method to determine if two geometric structures on manifolds are locally equivalent under some pseudogroup action, applicable to a wide range of geometric structures. His method is a hybrid of the method of equivariant moving frames of Olver and Pohjanpelto and of the equivalence method of Elie Cartan. Apparently, it achieves greater computational efficiency than those methods. Arnaldsson gives several examples of computations in coordinates. He assumes familiarity with the papers of Olver and Pohjanpelto. Where Cartan would build up a tower of bundles and on them define invariant differential forms, Olver and Pohjanpelto start with Maurer-Cartan forms for a pseudogroup action, defined on a tower of jet bundles, and cut down the invariantly defined differential forms through invariant equations among them. Arnaldsson's hybrid method apparently clarifies the appearance of the structure groups of Cartan's bundles in the Olver-Pohjanpelto theory.