A comparison of one-step methods for multibody system dynamics in descriptor and state space form (Q1369439)

This paper considers the numerical solution of large multibody problems. If there are \(n\) bodies and the problem is written as an ordinary differential equation (ODE) then there are \(n\) equations, while if it is written as a differential algebraic equation (DAE) of index two there are \(3n\) differential equations and \(2n\) algebraic equations. However, since the ODE representation is dense while the DAE representation is sparse, numerical implementations can exploit sparse linear algebra techniques. Numerical tests with different methods show that the computational time between the ODE and DAE approaches are very similar, and since in many cases it can be difficult to represent such problems purely as ODEs the DAE approach is to be preferred.