
its random environment. In order to preserve the power-
preserving interconnection we consider the Stratonovich
formulation of the stochastic integral, see for instance
Duan and Wang (2014). Interested readers may also be
referred to Ruth F. Curtain (1978) and Da Prato and
Zabczyk (2014) for further details on infinite-dimensional
SDEs.
The content of this article is as follows. In Section 2 we
introduce the basic concepts on Dirac structures together
with the class of deterministic port-Hamiltonian systems.
In Section 3 a port-based representation for SPHSs is pre-
sented and it is shown to form a Dirac structure, which
is the main contribution of the paper. Section 4 is ded-
icated to the illustration of our central result, by show-
ing that some interconnection between the newly defined
Dirac structure and another arbitrary Dirac structure that
shares common ports is still a Dirac structure. A stochas-
tic damped vibrating string actuated by a mass-spring sys-
tem at the boundary is then presented as an example. We
conclude and discuss some future works in 5.
2. Background on Dirac structure
In this section we introduce some notions on distributed
port-Hamiltonian systems, Tellegen structures and Dirac
structures. Let us first recall the definitions of Tellegen
and Dirac structures for linear distributed PHSs, see e.g.
van der Schaft and Maschke (2002), Le Gorrec et al. (2005)
and Kurula et al. (2010). Let Eand Fbe two Hilbert
spaces endowed with the inner products h·,·iEand h·,·iF,
respectively. The spaces Eand Fdenote the effort and
the flow spaces, respectively. We define the bond space
B:= F × E equipped with the following inner product
f1
e1,f2
e2B
=hf1, f2iF+he1, e2iE(1)
for all (f1, e1),(f2, e2)∈ B.
To define Tellegen or Dirac structures, the bond space is
endowed with the bilinear symmetric pairing given by
f1
e1,f2
e2+
=hf1, j−1e2iF+he1, jf2iE,(2)
with j:F → E being an invertible linear mapping. The
bilinear pairing h·,·i+represents the power.
Let Vbe a linear subspace of B. The orthogonal subspace
of Vwith respect to the bilinear pairing h·,·i+is defined
as
V⊥:= {b∈ B :hb, vi+= 0,for all v∈ V}.(3)
These tools enable us to define Tellegen and Dirac struc-
tures, see (Kurula et al., 2010, Definition 2.1).
Definition 2.1. A linear subspace Dof the bond space
B:= F×E is called a Tellegen structure if D ⊂ D⊥, where
the orthogonal complement is understood with respect to
the bilinear pairing h·,·i+, see (2).
Definition 2.2. A linear subspace Dof the bond space B
is said to be a Dirac structure if
D⊥=D.(4)
Note that the condition (4) implies that the power of any
element of the Dirac structure is equal to zero, i.e.,
f
e,f
e+
= 2hf, j−1eiF= 0,
for any (f, e)∈ D, where the relation hf, j−1eiF=
hjf, eiEhas been used. The underlying structure of port-
Hamiltonian systems forms a Dirac structure, which links
the port-variables in a way that the total power is equal to
zero. A distributed port-Hamiltonian system is described
by the following partial differential equation
∂ε
∂t (ζ, t) = P1
∂
∂ζ (H(ζ)ε(ζ, t)) + P0H(ζ)ε(ζ, t),(5)
where ε(ζ, t)∈Rnfor ζ∈[a, b] and t≥0. In addi-
tion, P1=PT
1∈Rn×nis invertible, P0=−PT
0∈Rn×n,
and H ∈ L∞([a, b]; Rn×n) is symmetric and satisfies mI ≤
H(ζ) for all ζ∈[a, b] and some constant m > 0. The state
space X:= L2([a, b]; Rn) is endowed with the energy inner
product hε1, ε2iX=hε1,Hε2iL2=Rb
aε1(ζ)TH(ζ)ε2(ζ)dζ,
for all ε1, ε2∈X. The energy associated to (5) is given by
E(t) = 1
2kε(t)k2
X.
The boundary ports denoted by f∂and e∂are given by
f∂(t)
e∂(t)=1
√2P1−P1
I I (Hε(t))(b)
(Hε(t))(a)=: R0(Hε(t))(b)
(Hε(t))(a)
(6)
and represent a linear combination of the restriction at the
boundary variables. Note that the notation (Hε(t))(a) :=
H(a)ε(a, t) has been used. We complete the PDE (5) with
the following homogeneous boundary conditions
0 = WBf∂(t)
e∂(t),(7)
where WB∈Rn×2n. It can be easily seen that the PDE
(5) together with the boundary conditions (7) admits the
abstract representation ˙ε(t) = Aε(t), ε(0) = ε0∈ X where
the linear (unbounded) operator Ais defined by
Aε:= P1
d
dζ (Hε) + P0Hε(8)
for εon the domain
D(A) = ε∈X:Hε∈H1([a, b]; Rn), WBf∂
e∂= 0.
(9)
Before introducing the concept of Dirac structure for (5)
and (7), let us recall the following two results from Jacob
and Zwart (2012).
Lemma 2.1. Consider the operator Adefined by (8) with
domain (9). Then the following result holds:
hAε, εiX+hε, AεiX= 2fT
∂e∂.(10)
2