General System Identification — Fundamentals and Results

The term identification was introduced by Zadeh in a 1956 paper [1] as a generic expression for the problem of “determining the input-output relationships of a black box by experimental means.” He cited the various terminologies then prevalent for the same problem: “characterization,” “measurement,” “evaluation,” “gedanken experiments,” etc., and noted that the term “identification” states “the crux of the problem with greater clarity than the more standard terms above.”