Structure-Preserving Identification of Port-Hamiltonian Systems—A Sensitivity-Based Approach

We present a gradient-based calibration algorithm to identify a port-Hamiltonian system from given time-domain input-output data. The gradient is computed with the help of sensitivities and the algorithm is tailored such that the structure of the system matrices of the port-Hamiltonian system (skew-symmetry and positive semi-definitness) is preserved in each iteration of the algorithm. As we only require input-output data, we need to calibrate the initial condition of the internal state of the port-Hamiltonian system as well. Numerical results with synthetic data show the feasibility of the approach.