Incidence-based Combinatorial Geometry on Cell Complexes

Abstract

Combinatorial Mesh Calculus (CMC) formulates conservation laws directly on cell complexes using combinatorial differential forms and their cochain representations. This note develops an incidence-based geometric extension of that framework for directional quantities and local geometric structure on explicit cellular organisation. The central construction is a family of local fibres generated intrinsically by the incidence structure of the complex. Each vertex carries a vector space spanned by its incident edge directions, providing a combinatorial analogue of a tangent space whose dimension reflects local topology. These fibres define local coefficient spaces for incidence-based vector-, covector- and endomorphism-valued cochains. Directed transport maps compare states attached to neighbouring fibres, while a canonical solder form relates fibre directions to the underlying cell-complex structure. Together they give rise to finite combinatorial analogues of transport, torsion, curvature and metric structure. Evaluation cup products provide pairings between kinematic and force-like quantities, while bundle Hodge operators induced by the fibre metric relate vector- and covector-valued cochains, and weighted covariant incidence operators define degree-raising transport-corrected operations on incidence cochains. The framework does not assume a smooth manifold, fixed-rank bundle, cellular sheaf or local system. Instead, geometric structure is generated directly from the organisation represented by the cell complex. The resulting theory establishes a combinatorial scaffold for geometry on explicit cellular organisation and identifies the principal mathematical questions required for its further development, including admissible transport classes, metric compatibility, Cartan-type structure equations and locality-dependent algebraic structures.