AN OBJECT-ORIENTED APPROACH FOR AN EFFECTIVE FORMULATION OF MULTIBODY DYNAMICS

This paper describes a new method for the modeling of the kinematics and dynamics of multibody systems, which is based on the responsibility-driven approach for object-oriented design and the concept of 'kinetostatic transmission elements' for mechanical modeling. As a result, a highly data-independent formulation is achieved, where the generic operations offer several analogies to general mappings from manifold theory. The implementation of the approach offers a collection of classes which resemble their real-world counterparts and which allow us to develop, by simple assembly of pre-defined objects, 'hand-tailored' multibody programs which are fast and can be integrated in other applications. This is illustrated by an example. Although in this paper the mathematical complexity of the underlying equations is held at a low level, it is easy to extend the method to cover graphical rendering, efficient computation techniques, and elasticity effects. These extensions will be described in future publications