Distributed

This book introduces some recent developments in Bayesian real-time system identification. It contains two different perspectives on data processing for system identification, namely centralized and distributed. A centralized Bayesian identification framework is presented to address challenging problems of real-time parameter estimation, which covers outlier detection, system, and noise parameters tracking. Besides, real-time Bayesian model class selection is introduced to tackle model misspecification problem. On the other hand, a distributed Bayesian identification framework is presented to handle asynchronous data and multiple outlier corrupted data. This book provides sufficient background to follow Bayesian methods for solving real-time system identification problems in civil and other engineering disciplines. The illustrative examples allow the readers to quickly understand the algorithms and associated applications. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers in civil and mechanical engineering. Practitioners can also find useful reference guide for solving engineering problems.

As artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to more complex problems and a wider set of applications, the ability to take advantage of the computational power of distributed and parallel hardware architectures and to match these architec­ tures with the inherent distributed aspects of applications (spatial, functional, or temporal) has become an important research issue. Out of these research concerns, an AI subdiscipline called distributed problem solving has emerged. Distributed problem-solving systems are broadly defined as loosely-coupled, distributed networks of semi-autonomous problem-solving agents that perform sophisticated problem solving and cooperatively interact to solve problems. N odes operate asynchronously and in parallel with limited internode commu­ nication. Limited internode communication stems from either inherent band­ width limitations of the communication medium or from the high computa­ tional cost of packaging and assimilating information to be sent and received among agents. Structuring network problem solving to deal with consequences oflimited communication-the lack of a global view and the possibility that the individual agents may not have all the information necessary to accurately and completely solve their subproblems-is one of the major focuses of distributed problem-solving research. It is this focus that also is one of the important dis­ tinguishing characteristics of distributed problem-solving research that sets it apart from previous research in AI.