Robust identification method for nonlinear model structures and its application to high-performance aircraft

A common assumption is that the model structure is known for modelling high performance aircraft. In practice, this is not the case. Actually, structure identification plays the most important role in the processing of nonlinear system modelling. The integration of mode structure identification and parameter estimation is an efficient method to construct the model for high performance aircraft, which is nonlinear and also contains uncertainties. This article presents an efficient method for identifying nonlinear model structure and estimating parameters for high-performance aircraft model, which contains uncertainties. The parameters associated with nonlinear terms are considered one after the other if they should be included in the nonlinear model until a stopping criterion is met, which is based on Akaike's information criterion. A numerically efficient U-D factorisation is presented to avoid complex computation of high-order matrices. The proposed method is applied to flight test data of a high-performance aircraft. The results demonstrate that the proposed method could obtain the good aircraft model with a reasonably good fidelity based on the comparison with flight test data.