An analytical approach to the sensitivity analysis of semi-recursive ODE formulations for multibody dynamics

Abstract

Sensitivity analysis is an extremely powerful tool in many applications such as in the optimization of the dynamics of multibody systems with gradient-based methods. Sensitivity calculations are computationally burdensome and, depending on the method chosen for differentiation and the set of dynamic equations, they could result highly inefficient. Semi-recursive dynamic methods are seldom studied analytically in terms of sensitivity analysis due to their complexity, even though their dynamic performance is usually among the most efficient.