Automated Identification of Differential-Variational Equations for Static Systems

Data-driven equation identification for dynamical systems has achieved great progress, which for static systems, however, has not kept pace. Unlike dynamical systems, static systems are time invariant, so we cannot capture discrete data along the time stream, which requires identifying governing equations only from scarce data. This work is devoted to this topic, building a data-driven method for extracting the differential-variational equations that govern static behaviors only from scarce, noisy data of responses, loads, as well as the values of system attributes if available. Compared to the differential framework typically adopted in equation identification, the differential-variational framework, due to its spatial integration and variation arbitrariness, brings some advantages, such as high robustness to data noise and low requirements on data amounts. The application, efficacy, and all the aforementioned advantages of this method are demonstrated by four numerical examples, including three continuous systems and one discrete system.