G. Domokos et Z. Gaspar, A GLOBAL, DIRECT ALGORITHM FOR PATH-FOLLOWING AND ACTIVE STATIC CONTROL OF ELASTIC BAR STRUCTURES, Mechanics of structures and machines, 23(4), 1995, pp. 549-571
A method is presented by means of which the equilibrium path of any el
astic bar structure may be traced globally, without applying iteration
techniques. The basic idea is that the bar structure is reduced to a
set of Initial Value Problems (IVPs) with parameters, arid the equilib
rium path is piecewise linearly interpolated in the parameter space. T
he way in which this method is capable of handling problems of active
static control is demonstrated. The mathematical basis of this type of
method is described by Allgower and Georg [1] as the Piecewise Linear
(PL) algorithm. Here it is shown how this algorithm can be applied to
problems in structural mechanics.