Book Reviews

This book deals primarily with the simulation of hardware systems such as those found in the aeronautical and aerospace industries where differential equations represent the system dynamics. Usually there are known representations of such systems, and because of the nonlinearities, or the need for system identification, simulation must be used to see how components interact and to design them to achieve a desired performance. For such systems, this book provides a distillation of the many years of valuable experience of the authors with engineering systems and provides a view of simulation not found in other books–the use of simulation for control purposes in addition to design. This should be the most important goal of simulations, but it is rarely sought after or achieved. So the orientation here is useful and practical, and in a certain sense, novel.