Constitutive hybrid processes

Introduction When modeling a physical system, it is common practice to describe the components that constitute the system, using so-called constitutive relations on the physical variables that play a role in the system. The intersection of all these relations then forms a model of the system as a whole. The behavior of physical systems is usually assumed to be continuous and, therefore, the constitutive relations are often stated as differential algebraic equations. When part of the continuous behavior occurs very fast, however, as is for example the case when studying impact phenomena, it may be convenient to describe this behavior as being discontinuous. The constitutive relations that are used to describe the system, should in that case not only contain algebraic differential equations (for the large time-scale behavior), but using also equations that describe the discontinuous behavior (for the behavior during impact). In this report, we describe the constitutive relations of many more-or-less standard components in physical modeling, using the hybrid process algebra HyPA [4]. This algebra allows us to describe combinations of continuous and discontinuous behavior as one, hybrid, process (hence, the title of this report). As a vehicle for our thoughts, we use a graphical language named bond graphs [11] to formalize our physical models, before engaging in the construction of constitutive relations for them. Bond graphs generalize all domains of physics, such as electronics, hydraulics, and mechanics, in one framework. Recently, they have been extended with elements that are suitable for describing discontinuous behavior [10, 9, 1, 12]. This report, can therefore also be considered an attempt to give a formal semantics to hybrid bond graphs. Our expectation is, that after we have explained how to derive hybrid constitutive processes using hybrid bond graphs, it will also be easier to derive these processes directly, without using bond graphs as an intermediate step. Nevertheless, the construction of a bond graph sometimes gives additional insight in the workings of a system, and can facilitate analysis in many ways (see for example [8, 14, 3, 2]). In general, different model representations have strengths in different kinds of analysis. In the next section, we give a short discussion on the modeling of physical systems through constitutive relations, using an example from mechanical engineering. Then, we briefly explain the traditional bond graph modeling method and discuss the need for abstraction from small timescale behavior. In section 3 we briefly discuss the syntax and semantics of hybrid process algebra [4]. In section 4, we turn back to the bond graph modeling formalism, to see how the constitutive relations of the bond graph elements can be extended to include discontinuous behavior. In the last section, we give modeling examples that show how hybrid bond graph models can be made of several physical systems, and how these bond graph models can be turned into constitutive hybrid processes describing the systems algebraically