**Preface to "Multibody Systems with Flexible Elements"**

Multibody systems with flexible elements are a field of great contemporary interest in multiple fields, with various industrial applications. Their study and the development of appropriate models represent a desire of current research in the field of applied mechanics. The high interest in the field is also indicated by the publications dealing with multibody systems and the large amount of scientific literature and numerous published monographs. This book aims to contribute to this large flow of scientific information in a representative field of current research. Mechanical systems with elastic elements are considered where the displacements of each or some of the elements of the system are generally large and cannot be neglected in mechanical modeling. The study of these multibody systems covers many industrial fields, but also has applications in medicine, sports, and art. The systematic treatment of the dynamic behavior of interconnected bodies has led to an important number of formalisms for multibody systems within mechanics. This formalism is currently used in many engineering fields, especially robotics and vehicle dynamics. The formalism of multibody systems offers a means of algorithmic analysis, assisted by computers, and a means of simulating and optimizing an arbitrary movement of a possibly high number of elastic bodies in the connection. The domain where researchers apply these methods are robotics, simulations of the dynamics of vehicles, biomechanics, aerospace engineering (helicopters and the behavior of cars in a gravitational field), internal combustion engines, gearboxes, transmissions, mechanisms, the cellulose industry, simulations of particle behavior (granulated particles and molecules), dynamic simulations, military applications, computer games, medicine, and rehabilitation.

We hope that the present volume will present a small but useful contribution in the field of multibody systems.

> **Marin Marin, Dumitru Baleanu, and Sorin Vlase** *Editors*
