For many years it has been an article of faith of numerical analysts that the evaluation of derivatives of complicated functions should be avoided. Derivatives were evaluated using finite differences or, more recently, using symbolic manipulation packages. The first has the disadvantage of limited accuracy. The second has disadvantages of being expensive and requiring considerable computer memory. The recent developments described in this text allow the evaluation of derivatives using simple automatic derivative evaluation subroutines pro grammed in FORTRAN or BASIC. These subroutines can...

This book is a self-contained text devoted to the numerical determination of optimal inputs for system identification. It presents the current state of optimal inputs with extensive background material on optimization and system identification. The field of optimal inputs has been an area of considerable research recently with important advances by R. Mehra, G. c. Goodwin, M. Aoki, and N. E. Nahi, to name just a few eminent in- vestigators. The authors' interest in optimal inputs first developed when F. E. Yates, an eminent physiologist, expressed the need for optimal or preferred inputs to...