What makes nonholonomic integrators work? (Q777499)

The performance of various nonholonomic integrators is investigated for reversible and non-reversible nonholonomic systems. Five classical nonholonomic test problems are considered as part of a larger family of nonholonomically coupled systems. A subset of nonholonomically coupled systems are foliations over reversible integrable systems. Using this observation, a new family of reversible integrable nonholonomic systems is obtained, thus extending existing model equations. With the help of the reversible KAM theorem, the long-time behavior of nonholonomic integrators is explained and observed experimentally. New perturbed test problems are proposed for nonholonomic integrators, which are integrable, but not reversible. Numerical experiments are carried out with five commonly used nonholonomic integrators on both reversible (biased) and non-reversible (unbiased) test problems. It is shown that the behavior in the numerical simulations is consistent with the theoretically predicted ones. At the end of the paper, three open problems are listed. Backward error analysis for relevant classes of nonholonomic systems, explanation of near conservation the driver energy of a rotating, non-reversible driver, energy-momentum methods that preserve fibrations.