System Identification 2024-2025

Lecturer: Lucian Busoniu. Lab TAs: Mihalis Maer, Maria Ceapa. Project TA: Zoltan Nagy

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About this course

The course introduces system identification methods including time-domain and correlation analysis, prediction error methods and instrumental variables techniques. Input signals, online recursive variants, closed-loop identification, and model validation are also discussed. The material is described at an appropriate BSc level, and builds in a self-contained manner the required mathematical background. The course is based on the book System Identification by Soderstrom and Stoica.

This year, we will teach everything on-site (lectures, labs, and projects), but we will use online platforms for discussions with students (Microsoft Teams) and to take quizzes (ClassMarker). As a unique ID for each student, we will use use an email address that is associated to a ClassMarker account. Microsoft Teams may be associated with a different, Didatec email address (or you can of course use the Didatec email for everything). Details on how we are using these platforms can be found under the specific type of activity below.

This course is part of the Bachelor program of the Automation Department, UTCluj (3rd year 1st semester). Prerequisites: linear dynamical systems and linear algebra.

Evaluation rules

Grading:

The final grade will be a rounded, weighted average of all the evaluations per the percentages above, capped to 10. Note that each student can accumulate up to 110% + 0.9 points = 11.9 points; the extra points means that you can compensate across categories to a certain extent.

Eligibility conditions: Solutions to all labs except the first one; the two lab tests; and solutions to both parts of the project, presented in the interactive sessions, are all required before being admitted to the exam. More details about each component (labs, lab tests, project evaluation) are found at the appropriate places in their separate descriptions below.

Schedule

Lectures are Wednesdays from 8AM, labs and projects on Mondays and Tuesdays. Please look at the schedule below carefully to determine exactly when you should be in class, and see the overall schedule on http://www.aut.utcluj.ro/ for when your time slots are allocated.

Image with schedule table

Due to interdependencies between lectures, labs, and project classes; public holidays; and other constraints, the actual schedule is slightly different from the official one. Notably:

Lectures

The lecture slides are mandatory reading; they will be written down in detail to give a self-contained, complete picture of the topics. They are made available here in time for each lecture.

At a random point during each lecture, a short quiz will be given from the material of that lecture, using the ClassMarker platform. A list of email addresses will be collected beforehand and you will be invited to ClassMarker. The quizzes are graded! So, you should pay attention during the lectures. If you answer all the questions in every lecture correctly, you get 1 point in your grade; lower scores scale linearly to between 0 and 1 points in the grade.

In addition to the slides, followers may optionally consult the following books:

Labs

Logistics and platform

Labs will be developed using Matlab. PDF descriptions of the labs are given on this website.

Lab solutions are required starting from lab 2. It is not enough to be present at the lab in order to be marked present; a complete, working, and original solution must be developed during the lab, see below for how we check whether the solution is working and its originality. At most two labs in total can be recovered before the exam; hence, accumulating three or more missing labs means you can no longer become eligibile for the exam. At most one copied lab can be recovered at any time during the year. Copying more than one lab automatically means you forfeit the discipline and retake it next year.

Half-group boundaries are strict, for example you cannot access the quiz to the lab unless you are present during the lab slot of your halfgroup.

Lab quiz

Each lab except the first starts with a 2-minute quiz containing 2 short questions, which tests you on the lecture material relevant to that particular lab. If you answer everything correctly for all the labs, you get 1 point in your grade; lower scores scale linearly, as for the lecture quizzes. So, you should arrive prepared.

Deadline, on-time bonus, and lab validation

The validation that the lab is complete and working, as well as a first test of originality, is performed during a discussion with the TA. We will ask thorough questions to make sure that you were the source of the code (as opposed to some code generation tool such as ChatGPT). If you fail to answer these questions successfully, the lab may already be declared copied at this step. If you pass this validation step, you are allowed to submit your solution to a Teams assignment that will be created for each lab.

We very much prefer that students validate their lab as working and upload it to Teams during their nominal 2-hour slot. To promote this, for each lab that satisfies this condition, the submitting student gets 0.1 points bonus in their final grade.

The final deadline to validate and submit the lab is the Tuesday of the week after the lab, at 11:59PM. After that, the assignment is closed.

Once the assignment closes, the solutions to each lab are run through an automated plagiarism check to defend against copying between students. Each suspicious case is examined by the teachers, and if it becomes clear that the lab is copied, both the source and the destination lab are marked copied.

As pointed out above, we are imposing a "two strikes - you're out" rule. Namely, the first lab copied is only invalidated, and you can recover it at the end. The second lab copied invalidates the full set of solutions, you forfeit the discipline and have to take it next year.

DC motor system

We will be using a real DC motor system in our lab work. Associated files: DC motor usage guide (PDF); software (ZIP, version 5, updated 4 Oct 2024). If you work on your labs in C13 on Linux, those machines are already configured so you should not need to download any software.

Lab descriptions

Lab tests

Lab test 1: The slots will be assigned in the online table. Please check carefully as due to scheduling constraints some students are out of their regular slot (reassignments are done preventing overlaps with other activities). This is mainly because there are a lot of students and delays after a half-group's lab slot are likely. Keep in mind that the lab tests are required for eligibility. The test will have two components, described and graded as follows:

Lab test 2: The same structure as for test 1, except now from labs 6 to 10.

The grade at each lab test is added with a 0.15 weight to the final grade, irrespective of its value.

Project

See the project description (PDF) for the topic, rules, and deadlines. Please read it carefully. A detailed description of the linear regression method needed in the first part of the project can be found in lecture 2 (for now link the link points to the slides from the previous year, it will be updated).

Guidelines for writing a report and developing and giving your presentation are also available. We will not be using reports this year but many of the principles there are also applicable.

Comments, suggestions, questions etc. related to this course or website are welcome; please contact either the lecturer or the TAs via Teams or email.