Plastic straining, unstressing and branching in large displacement perturbation analysis

The nonlinear system of equations and inequalities relating to the large displacement behaviour of elasto‐plastic structures can be transformed by the method of perturbations into an infinite sequence of recursive linear complementarity problems (LCP). Each such LCP can be solved by a simple variant of the simplex algorithm of linear programming. Special consideration is given to describing those steps of the algorithm that are needed for detecting and controlling the phenomena of plastic straining, unstressing and branching.