Identification and Validation for Robust Control: Design Issues

Model validation is the exercise of assessing whether a model of some underlying system is good enough. The assessment of the quality of a model cannot be decoupled from the purpose for which the model is to be used. And just as the research on system identification has, in the last 10 years, focused on issues of design in order to obtain a nominal model that suited the objective, so must the validation experiment similarly be designed in such a way that the model is guaranteed to deliver what the model is supposed to deliver. Thus, one must think in terms of “goal-oriented validation”. This presentation focuses on model validation for robust control. The validation step is the ultimate quality control station that allows the model builder to provide the user with certified guarantees about the quality of his/her model. Without such certification the user cannot confidently use the model for his particular application, since he has no guarantees about whether the model is able to achieve its purpose.