On the structural controllability of compartmental systems

Abstract

In this paper compartmental systems are modeled by a class of linearly parameterized matrix pairs and the controllability characteristics are expressed in terms of a compartmental graph. The result gives intuitive and physical information about the controllability and it extends the well-known result on the single-sink case to the multisink case. Furthermore, this result is applied to more special models, called undirected compartmental models, by which physical systems such as a class of liquid systems and of network systems, etc., can be concisely modeled.