Near-identifiability of dynamical systems (Q1063559)

Previous work on structural identifiability has been based on the assumption that the structure of the process was completely known and hence the model structure could be specified exactly. This paper is concerned with system identification in the presence of model structural errors. The near-equivalence between model and process is defined, using allowable bounds on modeling error and output error. Bounds on the output error are obtained and stated precisely. Sufficient conditions for near- equivalence are then obtained for given output error bounds. Finally, near-identifiability is defined in terms of the modeling error, and conditions for near-identifiability are obtained. An example illustrates the concepts introduced in the paper.