new iosys.interconnect is great, but...

The new naming functionality in iosys.interconnect function [1] has allowed me to create some very sophisticated systems much more easily than with append and connect. So far, no bugs that I have found. Very nice!

a few remarks on usage:

the inplist and outlist arguments are confusing and tricky. When you are writing code, its easy to forget shortened argument names like this: was it outplist or outlist? Also, they seem to exist to serve as a means to provide new names to the overall inputs and outputs. Is that a necessary feature? (might have to do with how system was set up for explicit interconnection) Possible to remove them and force the overall system to have the same input names and output names as constituent systems, and instead just provide inputs and outputs kwargs for interconnect? (edit: this is what matlab seems to do: https://www.mathworks.com/help/control/ref/connect.html)
auto-summing and auto-splitting, as suggested here: https://github.com/python-control/python-control/blob/master/doc/iosys.rst#automatic-connections-using-signal-names doesn't seem to work. For example, when I try to send the same signal u to both sys1 and sys2 in the following code a ValueError: signal u is not unique is raised:

sys1 = ct.tf(1, [10, 1])
sys2 = ct.tf(1, [2, 1])
summer = ct.iosys.summing_junction(['y1', 'y2'], 'y')
sys1 = ct.iosys.tf2io(sys1, inputs='u', outputs='y1')
sys2 = ct.iosys.tf2io(sys2, inputs='u', outputs='y2')
parallel = ct.interconnect((summer, sys1, sys2), inplist='u', outlist='y')

similarly for auto-summing. the following raises ValueError: signal y is not unique:

splitter = ct.ss2io(ct.ss([], [], [], [[1],[1]]), inputs='u', outputs=('u1', 'u2'))
sys1 = ct.iosys.tf2io(sys1, inputs='u1', outputs='y')
sys2 = ct.iosys.tf2io(sys2, inputs='u2', outputs='y')
parallel = ct.interconnect((splitter, sys1, sys2), inplist='u', outlist='y')

I don't know how hard these are to fix, it depends on how the underlying interconnection code works. One option would be to just modify the docs to remove mention of auto splitting and summing and add a helper splitter functoin:

def splitter(inputs, outputs):
    D = np.ones((len(outputs),1))
    C = np.zeros_like(D)
    return io.ss2io(ct.ss(0, 0, C, D), inputs=inputs, outputs=outputs)

[1]

python-control/control/iosys.py

Line 1850 in 73f65df

def interconnect(syslist, connections=None, inplist=[], outlist=[],

@sawyerbfuller

The lack of autosumming is a bug and I can fix that one pretty quickly. Adding a splitter function might also be useful, so I'll probably do that at the same time.

For inplist/inputs and outlist/outputs: as @sawyerbfuller points out, there are two things that a user might want to do:

Choose which signals are inputs and outputs (from the set of signals inside the system, including possible sums of those signals)
Name the signals

The idea is that inplist/outlist specifies the signals (including allowing summation and splitting) and inputs/outputs names them. Note that if you aren't using the autoconnect functionality then signal names are not unique without the system name prepended (so there might be multiple 'u[0]' signals, but only one 'sys[0].u[0]' signal) => not sure we want to just use the underlying signal name (it could get ugly if you have a couple of levels of nesting, so that your overall system output becomes 'sys[0].sys[1].y[0]' for example). It could also get ugly with implicit summing (an output could become 'sys[0].y[0]+sys[1].y[1]' for example).

@sawyerbfuller

The lack of autosumming is a bug and I can fix that one pretty quickly. Adding a splitter function might also be useful, so I'll probably do that at the same time.

🤙

For inplist/inputs and outlist/outputs: as @sawyerbfuller points out, there are two things that a user might want to do:
* Choose which signals are inputs and outputs (from the set of signals inside the system, including possible sums of those signals)

* Name the signals

Makes sense.

The idea is that inplist/outlist specifies the signals (including allowing summation and splitting) and inputs/outputs names them. Note that if you aren't using the autoconnect functionality then signal names are not unique without the system name prepended (so there might be multiple 'u[0]' signals, but only one 'sys[0].u[0]' signal) => not sure we want to just use the underlying signal name (it could get ugly if you have a couple of levels of nesting, so that your overall system output becomes 'sys[0].sys[1].y[0]' for example). It could also get ugly with implicit summing (an output could become 'sys[0].y[0]+sys[1].y[1]' for example).

For the output of an autosumming version of the summing-parallel-systems example above, it makes sense that you would not want the output name be 'y' if it is actually sys1.y + sys2.y (looks like in that case Matlab forces you to create a summing block with a new name).

I think I understand now. I am curious to see how it will work in practice with autosumming.

I’ve reread the text of this issue, and I think the name change is fair enough : )

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new iosys.interconnect is great, but... #530

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new iosys.interconnect is great, but... #530

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murrayrm commented on Feb 4, 2021

sawyerbfuller commented on Feb 4, 2021

sawyerbfuller commented on Feb 7, 2021

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