Structure-unknown non-linear dynamic systems: identification through neural networks

Explores the potential of using parallel distributed processing (neural network) approaches to identify the internal forces of structure-unknown non-linear dynamic systems typically encountered in the field of applied mechanics. The relevant characteristics of neural networks, such as the processing elements, network topology, and learning algorithms, are discussed in the context of system identification. The analogy of the neural network procedure to a qualitatively similar non-parametric identification approach, which was previously developed by the authors for handling arbitrary non-linear systems, is discussed. The utility of the neural network approach is demonstrated by application to several illustrative problems.