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Abstract

Like controllability, observability has important and easily visualized interpretations in terms of the natural language definitions of the word, but it should be recognized ultimately as a technical term. In particular, a system which is not an observable system is not ‘unobservable’. In this section we look at some of the tests and concepts for observability. The reader may note the striking similarity to the Chapter 22 section on controllability; this is not quite accidental, as the two concepts are mathematical duals of each other. To avoid near repetition, some results for continuous time systems are emphasized along with standard discrete time system results.

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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Westphal, L.C. (1995). Observability. In: Sourcebook of Control Systems Engineering. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1805-1_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1805-1_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-5729-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-1805-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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