System Identification: New Paradigms, Challenges, and Opportunities

The traditional paradigm of system identification employs prior information on system structures and environments and input/output observation data to derive system models. Extensive research and development on its methodologies, theoretical foundation, algorithms, verifications, and applications over the past half century have established a mature field with a rich literature and substantial benchmark applications. However, rapid advancement in science, technology, engineering, and social medias has ushered in a new era of systems science and control in which challenges and opportunities are abundant for system identification. In this sense, system identification remains an exciting, young, viable, and critical field that mandates new paradigms to meet such challenges. This article points out some potentially important aspects of system identification in these new paradigms, suggests some worthy areas of research focus, and most importantly opens the forum for further discussions.