Multisensor Out-Of-Sequence Data Fusion for Estimating the State of Dynamic Systems

Physically distributed sensors, communication networks, preprocessing algorithms and other reasons can delay or disorder the arrival of the information, provided by a set of sensors, to the fusion centre which is in charge of estimating the state of a system. In real-time control systems, the out-of-sequence data cannot delay the process of estimating the state of the system with the already received data and so the algorithms of the fusion centre need to handle this type of data properly. In this paper we present two new algorithms for solving the out-of-sequence data problem for the case of linear and nonlinear dynamic control systems and compare them with other algorithms which exist in the literature. The algorithm for the linear case is equivalent to others but more general, while the nonlinear one is a new solution of the problem.