Partial observer canonical form for multi-output nonlinear forced system: a new method

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the design method of partial observer canonical form (POCF), which is one of the important research tools for industrial plants.Design/methodology/approachMotivated by the two-steps method proposed in Xu et al. (2020), this paper extends this method to the case of Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) nonlinear system. It decomposes the original system into two subsystems by observable decomposition theorem first and then transforms the observable subsystem into OCF. Furthermore, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existing of POCF are proved.FindingsThe proposed method has a wide range of applications including completely observable nonlinear system, noncompletely observable nonlinear system, autonomous nonlinear system and forced nonlinear system. Besides, comparing to the existing results (Saadi et al., 2016), the method requires less verified conditions.Originality/valueThe new method concerning design POCF has better plants compatibility and less validation conditions.