There is a growing realization within the engineering, physical, biological, medical and social sciences that many nonlinear behaviors can be explained by discontinuities. A system with a discontinuous nonlinearity is sometimes referred to as a discontinuous differential system (DDS), which is a collective name to encompass every such system. The discontinuities in DDSs can have many different origins and manifestations. One classic example is a mechanical system that can experience discontinuities in the form of both impacts and friction. These two phenomena are modelled in different ways and also lead to different dynamical behaviours. Analysis of DDSs in general often requires special theoretical attention and novel techniques since analysis methods for smooth differential systems are not always sufficient. In recent years there has also been an increased amount of research into numerical methods for DDSs. However, the large number of possible system types together with a variety of different discontinuities makes it very hard to develop numerical methods that can deal with all the possibilities. Therefore, the development of general analytical and numerical methods for DDSs remains an open area of research, but any success would have huge implications in many fields of science.
The Guest Editors of the Special Issue Discontinuous Differential Systems: Theory and Numerical Methods invite you to submit a paper for possible publication in Elsevier's Journal MATCOM (http://ees.elsevier.com/matcom).
The deadline for the submission is June 30, 2011.
According to the Journal's policy all submitted papers for consideration for inclusion in the Special Issue must contain original unpublished work that is not submitted for publication elsewhere and does not exceed 20 pages. All contributed papers will undergo the usual refereeing process.
Submit your contribution directly via the MATCOM website at http://ees.elsevier.com/matcom. For this, register as the corresponding author (get a login and a password). Next, login as author and submit the contribution. During this procedure, it is ESSENTIAL that the article type is specified as "DDS 2010". Otherwise, the paper might follow a different route for regular MATCOM issues and will not reach us at all.
Please note that manuscripts should be written in LaTex, if possible, with elsarticle.cls, Elsevier's document class for journal articles (see Elsevier's Preparing Documents with LaTex). To obtain the latest versions of elsarticle.cls and all other related files please visit The elsarticle LaTex Document Class, and download the archive file elsarticle.zip. This procedure will produce the precise typesetting used by MATCOM. Otherwise, the presentation of any paper in any recent issue of MATCOM should be observed very carefully.
The Guest Editors of the Special Issue: Bernard Brogliato (Bernard.Brogliato@inrialpes.fr)
Tassilo Küpper (kuepper@math.uni-koeln.de)
Luciano Lopez (lopezl@dm.uniba.it)
Petri Piiroinen (petri.piiroinen@nuigalway.ie)