Graphical matroid for causality assignment in bond graphs Original Research Article

Graphical methods provide useful tools to study the structure of systems. The bond-graph approach is used in modelling process of dynamical systems. The matroid theory offers a powerful tool if we are interested in combinatorial aspects of causality assignment. This paper is organized as follows: after an introduction, Section 2 introduces some matroid background, and Section 3 presents some matroid definitions about structural properties. In Section 4, the main result of this paper is the proposal of a procedure that constructs cycle and co-cycle graphs from graphical matroids defined in the previous section. Validity of this procedure and some examples are shown in Sections 5 and 6, respectively, and concluding remarks are given in Section 7.