The German Research Council (DFG) decided 1987 to establish a nationwide
five year research project devoted to dynamics of multibody systems. In
this project universities and research centers cooperated with the goal
to develop a general pur- pose multibody system software package. This
concept provides the opportunity to use a modular structure of the
software, i.e. different multibody formalisms may be combined with
different simulation programmes via standardized interfaces. For the DFG
project the database RSYST was chosen using standard FORTRAN 77 and an
object oriented multibody system datamodel was defined. The project
included - research on the fundamentals of the method of multibody
systems, - concepts for new formalisms of dynamical analysis, -
development of efficient numerical algorithms and - realization of a
powerful software package of multibody systems. These goals required an
interdisciplinary cooperation between mathematics, compu- ter science,
mechanics, and control theory. ix X After a rigorous reviewing process
the following research institutions participated in the project (under
the responsibility of leading scientists): Technical University of
Aachen (Prof. G. Sedlacek) Technical University of Darmstadt (Prof. P.
Hagedorn) University of Duisburg M. Hiller) (Prof.