Abstract :
Summary form only for tutorial. Measuring systems and instruments are becoming more and more complex and are presently capable of performing advanced measurement operations. The recent developments in sensor technology, analog-to-digital converters, and computational capabilities of DSP devices, and the relative simplicity with which these components can be interconnected have opened new possibilities to measurement science and practice. These developments are revealing a number of new issues involving the very fundamentals of the measurement science, from the definition of a new measurement paradigm to the metrological characterization of the measured results. This tutorial is therefore aimed at reconsidering these basic issues, having in mind their application to the modern measuring systems. A model of the measurement process, as a bridge between the empirical world and the world of knowledge and abstract concepts, will be presented. Within this model, the measurement process is only capable of providing incomplete knowledge (the measurement result) about the measurand. It will be shown how an incomplete knowledge about the measurand is still acceptable, provided that we are capable of estimating how incomplete this knowledge is. Starting from this consideration, the methods for characterizing the result of a measurement will be discussed, focusing mainly on the uncertainty, calibration, and traceability concepts. A short survey on the International Metrology Organizations will be also given. After having introduced the basic concept of metrology, a basic instrument diagram will be introduced, and the diagram of the modern systems based on digital signal processing techniques will be discussed in deeper details.
