Combinatorial Characterization for Global Identifiability of Separable Networks with Partial Excitation and Measurement

This work focuses on the generic identifiability of dynamical networks with partial excitation and measurement: a set of nodes are interconnected by transfer functions according to a known topology, some nodes are excited, some are measured, and only a part of the transfer functions are known. Our goal is to determine whether the unknown transfer functions can be generically recovered based on the input-output data collected from the excited and measured nodes. We introduce the notion of separable networks, for which global and so-called local identifiability are equivalent. A novel approach yields a necessary and sufficient combinatorial characterization for local identifiability for such graphs, in terms of existence of paths and conditions on their parity. Furthermore, this yields a necessary condition not only for separable networks, but for networks of any topology.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, article to appear in IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 202

Tight Bounds for Maximal Identifiability of Failure Nodes in Boolean Network Tomography

We study maximal identifiability, a measure recently introduced in Boolean Network Tomography to characterize networks' capability to localize failure nodes in end-to-end path measurements. We prove tight upper and lower bounds on the maximal identifiability of failure nodes for specific classes of network topologies, such as trees and $d$-dimensional grids, in both directed and undirected cases. We prove that directed $d$-dimensional grids with support $n$ have maximal identifiability $d$ using $2d(n-1)+2$ monitors; and in the undirected case we show that $2d$ monitors suffice to get identifiability of $d-1$. We then study identifiability under embeddings: we establish relations between maximal identifiability, embeddability and graph dimension when network topologies are model as DAGs. Our results suggest the design of networks over $N$ nodes with maximal identifiability $\Omega(\log N)$ using $O(\log N)$ monitors and a heuristic to boost maximal identifiability on a given network by simulating $d$-dimensional grids. We provide positive evidence of this heuristic through data extracted by exact computation of maximal identifiability on examples of small real networks