Finding circular relationships in networks
Kenneth J. Fordyce, Jan Jantzen, Gerald A. Sullivan · ACM SIGAPL APL Quote Quad · 1990
A critical computational requirement for many of the decision technologies in the fields of MS/OR, AI/KBS, and DSS is the development and manipulation of a network describing the relationship between "actors" involved in the application of the decision technology to a specific problem. The manipulation of such networks using Boolean arrays and functions is well known in the APL community (see bibliography). Often in such networks it is important to identify circular conditions as a preprocessing step, but the techniques to accomplish often yield incomplete information. This paper describes a simple and efficient method to find all circular conditions as a preprocessing step.This paper is a subset of a longer paper (Fordyce, Jantzen, and Sullivan, 1990) which describes how we can fully build and manipulate a function network with Boolean arrays including focusing networks, finding circular conditions, and grouping functions based on relative independence to identify parallel computational opportunities and substantially reduces the non-procedural aspect of the problem.