A system and method are described which take an arbitrarily assembled collection of nodes on a bus or network and imposes an optimized hierarchical tree structure where there is only one root node. Nodes having both parent and child nodes are considered branch nodes while nodes having only parent nodes are leaf nodes. A signaling scheme is developed in which nodes, via on board communications hardware, signal all connected nodes and respond accordingly until hierarchical relationships are established. System user intervention is initiated to resolve cycles in the arbitrary topology. Direction is established by each node recognizing its parent/child status with respect to connected nodes until a single node is established as a root node.
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