Generalized Prototype Bootstrapping for Nonlinear System Identification in an Accelerated Fatigue Testing Context

The Prototype Bootstrapping Method (PBM) is a sampling technique for nonlinear system identification specifically when applied to Accelerated Fatigue Testing (AFT). This application requires the number of samples taken to be limited as much as possible to preserve the integrity of the test. The work presents a generalization of this technique by removing system specific requirements from the algorithm. The generalized method is developed and tested in this paper. Various numerical experiments are conducted. These experiments show that Generalized PBM (GPBM) outperforms other sampling techniques, being 5.4 times more accurate. Through these experiments, the importance of sampling in this application is emphasized.