What kind of dynamics is a piecewise linear system able to display? How may they generate heteroclinic chaos? How can the coexistence of attractors be designed and characterized? Is it necessary to have equilibrium points to generate chaotic behavior? Chaos theory and complex systems are interesting and evolving topics whose investigation from a theoretical and practical point of view constantly leads to arising questions. Interesting behaviors can be observed in self-excited attractors, hidden attractors and non-self-excited attractors.This book presents some fundamentals of linear system theory and recent approaches to design the three classes of chaotic attractors in piecewise linear systems. Each chapter presents a brief description and basic concepts to provide an overview of linear systems theory; chaos and multistability in integer linear systems; hidden and non-self-excited attractors; and fractional approaches. They also provide example systems to illustrate the concepts and design methods introduced. Some current topics under investigation are addressed from an integer order perspective to make the connection with the fractional order counterpart.This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction, methodologies, and analysis tools to study chaotic piecewise linear systems and will be suitable for undergraduate or graduate students interested in the field of chaos and complex dynamics.

In recent years, entropy has been used as a measure of the degree of chaos in dynamical systems. Thus, it is important to study entropy in nonlinear systems. Moreover, there has been increasing interest in the last few years regarding the novel classification of nonlinear dynamical systems including two kinds of attractors: self-excited attractors and hidden attractors. The localization of self-excited attractors by applying a standard computational procedure is straightforward. In systems with hidden attractors, however, a specific computational procedure must be developed, since equilibrium points do not help in the localization of hidden attractors. Some examples of this kind of system are chaotic dynamical systems with no equilibrium points; with only stable equilibria, curves of equilibria, and surfaces of equilibria; and with non-hyperbolic equilibria. There is evidence that hidden attractors play a vital role in various fields ranging from phase-locked loops, oscillators, describing convective fluid motion, drilling systems, information theory, cryptography, and multilevel DC/DC converters. This Special Issue is a collection of the latest scientific trends on the advanced topics of dynamics, entropy, fractional order calculus, and applications in complex systems with self-excited attractors and hidden attractors.

"A textbook that presents the fundamentals of linear system theory and recent approaches to design the three classes of chaotic attractors in piecewise linear systems"--

In recent years, enormous progress has been made on nonlinear dynamics particularly on chaos and complex phenomena. This unique volume presents the advances made in theory, analysis, numerical simulation and experimental realization, promising novel practical applications on various topics of current interest on chaos and related fields of nonlinear dynamics.Particularly, the focus is on the following topics: synchronization vs. chaotic phenomena, chaos and its control in engineering dynamical systems, fractal-based dynamics, uncertainty and unpredictability measures vs. chaos, Hamiltonian systems and systems with time delay, local/global stability, bifurcations and their control, applications of machine learning to chaos, nonlinear vibrations of lumped mass mechanical/mechatronic systems (rigid body and coupled oscillator dynamics) governed by ODEs and continuous structural members (beams, plates, shells) vibrations governed by PDEs, patterns formation, chaos in micro- and nano-mechanical systems, chaotic reduced-order models, energy absorption/harvesting from chaotic, chaos vs. resonance phenomena, chaos exhibited by discontinuous systems, chaos in lab experiments.The present volume forms an invaluable source on recent trends in chaotic and complex dynamics for any researcher and newcomers to the field of nonlinear dynamics.