A simple and general method for detecting structural inconsistencies in large electrical networks

We propose to determine fundamental circuits of two matroids induced by certain bipartite graphs derived from the network equations in order to detect and locate inconsistencies in large electrical networks. Our method is easy to implement, is very fast, and does not rely on a specific form of network equations. It has been implemented in an industrial circuit simulator and, despite its simplicity, is of great help in locating inconsistencies in erroneous network descriptions, especially if these descriptions contain VHDL-AMS code.