Variational Integrators for Interconnected Lagrange-Dirac Systems

Interconnected systems are an important class of mathematical models, as they allow for the construction of complex, hierarchical, multiphysics, and multiscale models by the interconnection of simpler subsystems. Lagrange–Dirac mechanical systems provide a broad category of mathematical models that are closed under interconnection, and in this paper, we develop a framework for the interconnection of discrete Lagrange–Dirac mechanical systems, with a view toward constructing geometric structure-preserving discretizations of interconnected systems. This work builds on previous work on the interconnection of continuous Lagrange–Dirac systems (Jacobs and Yoshimura in J Geom Mech 6(1):67–98, 2014) and discrete Dirac variational integrators (Leok and Ohsawa in Found Comput Math 11(5), 529–562, 2011). We test our results by simulating some of the continuous examples given in Jacobs and Yoshimura (2014).