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INTRODUCTION
After the success
of the first System Identification Competition,
the organisation has prepared a second even more challenging one, involving
practical problems, such as solar radiation and experimental data. The
previous competition, the overall results and papers on selected methods
are published by the organisers in a book (January 1996). It shows that
a number of methods and techniques exist and how inventive researchers
can be to solve a relatively simple physical problem.
A wide range of
system identification techniques is now being applied to the analysis
problems involved with estimation of thermal properties of buildings
and building components. Similar problems arise in most observational
disciplines, including physics, biology, and economics. New commercially
available software tools and special purpose computer programs promise
to provide results that were unobtainable just a decade ago. Unfortunately,
the realisation and evaluation of this promise has been hampered by
the difficulty of making rigorous comparisons between competing techniques,
particularly ones that come from different disciplines.
This new competition,
that took place in 1996, has been organised to help clarify the conflicting
claims among many researchers who use and analyse building energy data
and to foster contact among these persons and their institutions. The
intent was not necessarily only to declare winners, but rather to set
up a format in which rigorous evaluations of techniques can be made.
Because there are natural measures of performance, a rank ordering will
be given. In all cases, however, the goal is to collect and analyse
quantitative results in order to understand similarities and differences
among the approaches. The performance of the techniques submitted will
be compared and published very soon on this site.
The present competition
is concerned with wall components and solar radiation. Four different
cases are provided for estimation and prediction. Three of these cases
have been designed with wall components in order to test parameter estimation
methods and include different degrees of difficulty. Prediction tests
are also included on experimental data. Some of the dependent variable
values will be withheld from the data set in this case. Contestants
are free to submit results from any number of cases.
An important aspect
in the evaluation of this competition is the ability to guarantee a
good quality of the analysis result of the participant.
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