Preface

Multibody system dynamics is a branch of computational mechanics that deals with modeling principles and computational methods for the dynamic analysis, simulation, and control of complex mechanical systems. These appear in a large spectrum of domains ranging, for example, from standard industrial production of vehicles, rotational machines and mechatronic devices to emerging application fields where biomolecular structures and smart materials are studied at the nanodimensional level. Such versatility of applications is rooted in the basic modeling principles of the discipline, which, being based on the kinematical and dynamical coupling of rigid and flexible bodies with different characteristics and mechanical properties, serve as a powerful tool to study the mechanical and multiphysics behavior of a broad class of systems in engineering and applied sciences. To cope with increasingly challenging scenarios in the context of more demanding materials and design requirements, the discipline had to develop and incorporate different modeling methods that found their successful coexistence within the framework of multibody system dynamics. Indeed, since its establishment in the 1970s as a discipline primarily focusing on rigid body mechanisms, multibody system dynamics has grown today into a field that offers solutions for various modeling, optimization and control tasks of quite complex highly developed industrial products; which often include multiphysics approaches, computational coupling techniques, geometric integrators and multiscale modeling techniques.