When identifying electrical, mechanical, or biological systems, parametric continuous-time identification methods can lead to interpretable and parsimonious models when the model structure aligns with the physical properties of the system. Traditional linear system identification may not consider the most parsimonious model when relying solely on unfactored transfer functions, which typically result from standard direct approaches. This paper presents a novel identification method that delivers additive models for both open and closed-loop setups. The estimators that are derived are shown to be generically consistent, and can admit the identification of marginally stable additive systems. Numerical simulations show the efficacy of the proposed approach, and its performance in identifying a modal representation of a flexible beam is verified using experimental data.

Block coordinate descent is an optimization technique that is used for estimating multi-input single-output (MISO) continuous-time models, as well as single-input single output (SISO) models in additive form. Despite its widespread use in various optimization contexts, the statistical properties of block coordinate descent in continuous-time system identification have not been covered in the literature. The aim of this letter is to formally analyze the bias properties of the block coordinate descent approach for the identification of MISO and additive SISO systems. We characterize the asymptotic bias at each iteration, and provide sufficient conditions for the consistency of the estimator for each identification setting. The theoretical results are supported by simulation examples.

Blind system identification is aimed at finding parameters of a system model when the input is inaccessible. In this paper, we propose a blind system identification method that delivers a single-input single-output, continuous-time model in a nonparametric kernel form. We take advantage of the representer theorem to form a joint maximum a posteriori estimator of the input and system impulse response. The identified system model and input are optimised in sequence to overcome the blind problem with generalised cross validation used to select appropriate hyperparameters given some fixed input sequence. We demonstrate via Monte Carlo simulations the accuracy of the method in terms of estimating the input.