Parameter reduction in nonlinear state-space identification of hysteresis

Hysteresis is a highly nonlinear phenomenon, showing up in a wide variety of science and engineering problems. The identification of hysteretic systems from input-output data is a challenging task. Recent work on black-box polynomial nonlinear state-space modeling for hysteresis identification has provided promising results, but struggles with a large number of parameters due to the use of multivariate polynomials. This drawback is tackled in the current paper by applying a decoupling approach that results in a more parsimonious representation involving univariate polynomials. This work is carried out numerically on input-output data generated by a Bouc-Wen hysteretic model and follows up on earlier work of the authors. The current article discusses the polynomial decoupling approach and explores the selection of the number of univariate polynomials with the polynomial degree, as well as the connections with neural network modeling. We have found that the presented decoupling approach is able to reduce the number of parameters of the full nonlinear model up to about 50%, while maintaining a comparable output error level.