Efficient modeling of linear circuits to perform qualitative reasoning tasks

Modeling a system is the first step in reasoning about physical devices. By restricting our domain to linear circuits, we can find an efficient algori thm to solve that task. The algorithm presented in this article is an efficient implementation of t he star-mesh reductions used in Electrical Engineering. By choosing the rig ht representation and based on simple data structures, we can reduce consid erably the process of modeling a circuit. The algorithm has three main sources of efficiency gain: An efficient clust er representation reduces the complexity of the produced model; a simple da ta structure reduces the search for parallel regions; in the last step, we generate a circuit model where the principle of superposition does not need to be applied. Those three points reduce dramatically both the complexity of the modeling process and the size of the model. The reduction in the siz e of the model favorably impacts its use in any reasoning task to be perfor med. Finally, avoiding superposition will allow us to treat this class of c ircuits more efficiently.