Abstract
A strongly connected stucture, in which many cycles exist and get entangled each other, is one of the most difficult system structures that can not be fully analyzed by the former methods.
This paper presents an effective structure analysis method for such a strongly connected structure. This method is outlined as follows. Firstly, all of the elementary cycles which form the base of strongly connected structure are picked up from the cycle set. Secondly, a new order relationship among these elementary cycles is defined based on two concepts, i. e., interval order and pseudo-interval order. The ordering results thus obtained are shown as a hierarchical directed graph in which the elementary cycles and the order relationships correspond to vertices and edges, respectively. The graph gives us a great deal of useful structural information buried in the strongly connected structure.
In this paper we demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by applying it to two examples.
