Interactive Software for Symbolic Modeling of Physical Systems Using Graphs

This paper presents a computational environment for teaching of control systems: Modsym. The software implements a graphical interface for physical systems modeling using graphs and calculates systems transfer functions in symbolic form. ModSym generalizes elements and dynamics variables of some physical systems based on the energy concept. This approach allows to represent and to connect elements of different systems in a linear graph. An algorithm implemented in the software, also presented in this paper, obtain a signal flow graph for the system linear graph which makes possible to use the Mason’s rule in calculating of the system transfer function.