Optimization of Covariance Matrices of Kalman Filter with Unknown Input Using Modified Directional Bat Algorithm

The proper selection of the model error covariance matrix and the measurement noise covariance matrix of Kalman filter is an optimization problem. Some scholars have studied this, but there is relatively little research on the selection of the two covariance matrices for Kalman filters with an unknown input. Recently, the authors proposed a modified directed bat algorithm (MDBA) which introduces the best historical location of individuals and the elimination strategy to effectively prevent falling into local optimal solution. So, two methods are proposed in this paper to optimize the model error covariance matrix and measurement noise covariance matrix of Kalman filter with unknown inputs (KF-UI) and extended Kalman filter with unknown inputs (EKF-UI) by MDBA, respectively. The objective functions are constructed using the measurement vectors and the corresponding estimated values, and MDBA is adopted to optimize the two covariance matrices of KF-UI and EKF-UI. To validate the effectiveness of proposed methods, two simple structure examples and a benchmark example are adopted. The influence of structural parameter uncertainties on KF-UI is also considered. The result shows that the MDBA-optimized KF-UI has a strong convergence and can take into account the effect of parameter uncertainties. Then, the effectiveness of the proposed MDBA-optimized EKF-UI method is validated by comparing it with EKF-UI with empirically selected covariance values through trial-and-error. The identification results showed that the proposed methods achieved better identification accuracy and enhanced convergence compared to KF-UI and EKF-UI with empirical covariance values.