Identification of nonlinear time-varying systems using wavelet neural networks

The dynamic model of an aircraft changes significantly by altering the flight speed and the vehicle altitude. Thus, a conventional aircraft has a nonlinear time-varying dynamic model in different regions of the flight envelope, and a dynamic model developed for a specific operating point is not valid in the entire flight envelope. This paper presents a novel identification approach that can deal with nonlinear and time-varying characteristics of complex dynamic systems, especially an aerial vehicle in the entire flight envelope. In this regard, a set of local submodels are first developed at different operating points of the system, and subsequently, a multimodel structure is introduced to aggregate the outputs of the local models as a single model. Wavelet Neural Networks (WNNs), which combine both the universal approximation property of neural networks and the wavelet decomposition capability, are used as the local models of the proposed scheme. Also, three different approaches for determining the validity functions of the local models are introduced to allow for identifying the time-varying dynamics of the system. The simulation results obtained for the Generic Transport Model aircraft suggest that the proposed WNN-based multimodel structure can be used satisfactorily as the prediction model of model-based flight control systems for long prediction horizons. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.