Foundations of system theory: multidecomposable systems☆

Abstract The paper discusses multilinear, and more generally multidecomposable, machines. An m-linear machine is shown to be realizable as a network of k-linear machines for k⩽(m-1), linked by certain memoryless m-linear maps. In this way, an m-linear machine can be broken down into linear machines and multilinear memoryless maps.