ABSTRACT
Ship maneuvering models are the keys to the research of ship maneuverability, design of ship motion control system and development of ship handling simulators (Shi et al 2006). For various frames of ship maneuvering models, determining the parameters of the models is always a tedious task. The usual approach to determine the ship model parameters is the ship model test. Ship model test is a reliable and accurate method for this purpose. The test is, however, expensive and timeconsuming, and usually dependent on some specific model frame, which limits the application of the valuable data (Li 1999). System identification theory can be used to establish system mathematical models by the system’s input data and output data.And it has been effectively used in the fields of space technology (Lacy et al 2005), robotic engineering and underwater engineering (Liu et al 2002). Various methodologies have been employed for system identification tasks, which include neural network (Narendra & Parthasarathy 1990), wavelet analysis (Shi et al 2005), and genetic algorithm (Nyarko & Scitovski 2004). Most of the
methodologies prove quite effective with the linear system identification.
