“…Fourth, and last, recent Doctoral Theses on this matter outlined the necessity of going further into the aforementioned topics, among others: Pagalday, 1994, Etman, 1997, Gonçalves, 2002, Schaffer, 2005, Vidal, 2006, Thoresson, 2007, Pasquotti, 2008, Hidalgo, 2013, and Banerjee, 2013 During the development of this Thesis, these dissertations have served as basic references, as they represent valuable sources on multibody dynamics, vehicle dynamics, optimization of multibody systems, sensitivity analysis of multibody systems and mechanism synthesis. Also, an analysis of the related bibliography was carried out (see the References chapter), revealing that there is still room for improvement and quality research on these areas.…”