A Simple Structural Analysis Method for DAEs

We describe a straightforward method for analysing the structure of a differential-algebraic system. It generalizes the method of Pantelides, but is more directly informative and applies to DAEs with derivatives of any order. It naturally leads to a numerical method for the initial value problem that combines projection and index reduction. We illustrate the method by examples, and justify it with proofs. We prove that it succeeds on a fairly wide class of systems encountered in practice, and show its relation to the Pantelides method and to the Campbell-Gear derivative-array equations.