This paper presents an investigation into the motion of two-wheelers: Everyday motorcycles and bicycles. The emphasis is on controllability of the system for small lateral deviations from straight running under idealized rider control. After introduction, a discussion of the kinematics, assumptions and geometry of a rider-vehicle system is presented, followed by a statement of the equations of motion. The control systems analogy is briefly reviewed, and state space methods formalize the concept of controllability. The difficulty in steered riding is quantified by the ratio of maximum to minimum singular values of the controllability Grammian and rideability is investigated for different designs of (a) a motorcycle from a well-known study and (b) a bicycle from a recent investigation. New insight into controlled two-wheeler behaviour is shown, compared with traditional methods, and can provide another means to design for a safety of vehicle performance.@en

This paper describes a novel implementation of the Simulated Annealing algorithm designed to explore the trade-off between multiple objectives in optimization problems. During search, the algorithm maintains and updates an archive of non-dominated solutions between each of the competing objectives. At the end of search, the final archive corresponds to a number of optimal solutions from which the designer may choose a particular configuration. A new acceptance probability formulation based on an annealing schedule with multiple temperatures (one for each objective) is proposed along with a novel restart strategy. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated on three examples. It is concluded that the proposed algorithm offers an effective and easily implemented method for exploring the trade-off in multiobjective optimization problems.@en