Gears and graphs

The paper presents, among others, a survey of works connected with the problem of the modeling of gears by means of versatile graph theory models. This approach to the problems of gear modeling allows computer based analysis and synthesis. Some recent papers claim that graph representations and derived methods belong to the branch of artificial intelligence due to the possibility of obtaining automatically versatile results, e.g. different constructional design solutions of mechanisms. Some examples are enclosed to explain which class of tasks is solved by means of the graph theory approach, i.e. modeling by means of bond graphs and linear graphs. The following problems have been considered: derivation of systems of equations describing the behaviour of gear subsystems and detection of a redundant wheel. The survey is based on over 60 papers published mainly within last 10 years, some of them in world-wide high level scientific magazines.