Abstract
This paper aims at extending the structural controllability/observability arguments hitherto developed for 1-D systems to multi-dimension systems. This amounts to investigating the “structural minor primeness” of a multi-variable polynomial matrix. A graph-theoretic criterion is derived for the “structural minor primeness” under the assumption that the nonzero coefficients are independent (in an algebraic sense). The criterion is effective for checking the “structural” controllability/observability of 2-D systems as it is expressed by means of the DM-decomposition of a bipartite graph and can be checked by an efficient algorithm. With possible minor modifications the criterion is applicable to various kinds of 2-D systems such as FM-model and time-delay systems.
