Representing Structure in Linear Interconnected Dynamical Systems

Interconnected dynamical systems are a pervasive component in our modern world's infrastructure. One of the fundamental steps to understanding the complex behavior and dynamics of these systems is determining how to appropriately represent their structure. In this work, we discuss different ways of representing a system's structure. We define and present, in particular, four representations of system structure-complete computational, subsystem, signal, and zero pattern structure-and discuss some of their fundamental properties. We illustrate their application with a numerical example and show how radically different representations of structure can be consistent with a single LTI input-output system.