The design of a graphical user interface to perform complex identification tasks

The task of identifying the dynamics of a system can generally be divided into four steps, consisting of: test signal design, data acquisition, analysis of the data and finally identification of the model parameters. Furthermore, the whole procedure involves tasks which may have to be repeated several times with different parameters. It is therefore advantageous to combine the software for test signal design, data acquisition and identification and provide easy access for the user through a graphical interface. The GUI approach presents data in a format which is easy for the user to interpret and which facilitates recursive operations. The data presentation is further tailored to the needs of the user by providing a range of display formats and analysis methods. The paper describes a GUI based package, which combines all the necessary functions to run a complete frequency domain system identification session