Evaluate time delay from sensor's data by trend similarity search
Haijie Gu, Gang Rong · International Journal of Systems Science · 2009
Time delay estimation is a general issue in both signal processing and process control fields. Neither offline step impulse response-based methods nor least squares methods in control field estimate time delay directly from the real running data. Although the methods for signal processing directly evaluate the delay from signals, such as correlation calculation, coherence analysis and least mean square methods, they are mainly suitable for two signals only different at a time delay part and an attenuation factor. In this article, an estimation method is proposed which is directly based on the real running input and output data of a control plant. The input and output signals of a plant show raw monotony from each other in many cases. According to this feature, we estimate the delay by comparing the trend of two signals. Furthermore, it is extended to an adaptive method for estimating piecewise time-varying delay by sliding window and forgetting factor. The experiments on real plant show the good performances of our methods. The simulation experiments demonstrate that our basic method performs better than CCF or coherence analysis for the nonlinear plant and the adaptive one performs better than least mean square methods for the signals with transfer function except time delay.