Systems Analysis and Synthesis

3.7. Continuous Systems

Although continuous systems aren’t the focus of this book, it is worth giving some space to them. As we shall see in a later chapter, both discrete and continuous systems exhibit dynamic behaviour. Such behaviour can be autonomous, that is, it can occur without external input. Sometimes autonomous behaviour is desirable, and sometimes it is not.

We cannot apply the notion of an FSA to the continuous behaviour of an aircraft, so what alternative do we have? Such a subject would fill a book, so we turn instead to a simple pendulum.

Consider an ideal pendulum consisting of a point mass m hanging by a weightless string of length ...