Boid-Inspired Harmony Search approach to aircraft parameter estimation

Aircraft parameter estimation is a vital technology in aeronautical industry. It is the fundamental of control law design and aircraft performance evaluation. Harmony Search (HS) is proposed in 2001, which mimics music players composing fantastic music. Its performance has been verified by many benchmark problems. In 1986, Reynolds proposed a mathematical model describing animals´ group behavior, and he generally named the flocking creature “boids”, which can be interpreted as “bird like objects”. We modify the pitch adjustment step of HS inspired by the boid model. Our new method is named Boid-Inspired Harmony Search (BIHS). This paper investigates the application of BIHS to aircraft parameter estimation problem. In this work, the longitudinal state-space model of F-18 jet is used. It is shown that the BIHS approach is efficient, and in some ways, has an advantage over the classical Maximum Likelihood (ML) method.