The CONTSID Toolbox: A Software Support for Data-based Continuous-time Modelling

Abstract

This chapter describes the continuous-time system identification (CONTSID) toolbox for MATLAB®, which supports continuous-time (CT) transfer function and state-space model identification directly from regularly or irregularly time-domain sampled data, without requiring the determination of a discrete-time (DT) model. The motivation for developing the CONTSID toolbox was first to fill in a gap, since no software support was available to serve the cause of direct time-domain identification of continuous-time linear models but also to provide the potential user with a platform for testing and evaluating these data-based modelling techniques. The CONTSID toolbox was first released in 1999 [15]. It has gone through several updates, some of which have been reported at recent symposia [11, 12, 16]. The key features of the CONTSID toolbox can be summarised as follows: it supports most of the time-domain methods developed over the last thirty years [17] for identifying linear dynamic continuous-time parametric models from measured input/output sampled data; it provides transfer function and state-space model identification methods for single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, including both traditional and more recent approaches; it can handle irregularly sampled data in a straightforward way; it may be seen as an add-on to the system identification (SID) toolbox for MATLAB® [26]. To facilitate its use, it has been given a similar setup to the SID toolbox; it provides a flexible graphical user interface (GUI) that lets the user analyse the experimental data, identify and evaluate models in an easy way.