In many mathematical models of physical phenomenons and engineering fields, such as electrical circuits or mechanical multibody systems, which generate the differential algebraic equations (DAEs) systems naturally. In general, the feature of DAEs is a sparse large scale system of fully nonlinear and high index. To make use of its sparsity, this paper provides a simple and efficient algorithm for index reduction of large scale DAEs system. We exploit the shortest augmenting path algorithm for finding maximum value transversal (MVT) as well as block triangular forms (BTFs). We also present the extended signature matrix method with the block fixed point iteration and its complexity results. Furthermore, a range of nontrivial problems are demonstrated by our algorithm. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.