Structural analysis and arrangement of systems

In the framework of global design of systems, the structural analysis and arrangement are considered. The authors introduce three measures of system structure called sparsity, connectivity, and clustering and develop a method that provides a basis for structural analysis, and arrangement of systems. Using those measures, the authors develop a technique of analyzing and (re-)arranging the structure of a given system. The key component of the technique is called the node reduction method. This method is applied to a graph that represents the structure of a system. It combines two nodes to construct a new supernode and updates the original graph. The authors implemented the node reduction method in FORTRAN on a personal computer. Based on experimental results, it is shown that the global structural analysis and arrangement of systems is very useful