Cycle bases of minimal measure for the structural analysis of skeletal structures by the flexibility method
A. C. Cassell, J.C. de C. Henderson, Kanagasabai Ramachandran · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A Mathematical and Physical Sciences · 1976
Abstract The development of the flexibility method of analysis of skeletal structures has been hindered by the difficulty of determining a suitable statical basis on which to form the flexibility matrix. A combinatorial approach reduces the difficulty to one of selecting a minimal basis of the cycle vector space. After an introduction to flexibility analysis and a brief review of earlier work using combinatorics, the paper presents a procedure to construct a finite sub-set of the cycle vector space containing the elements of all minimal bases. This makes the generation of the required basis feasible by a finite procedure, such as Welsh’s generalization of the Kruskal algorithm. It is thus possible to have an automatic method for the analysis of skeletal structures which uses an optimal combinatorial approach.