Decision-Based System Identification and Adaptive Resource Allocation

System identification extracts information from a system's operational data to derive a representative model for the system so that a decision can be made with desired accuracy and reliability. When resources are limited, especially for networked systems sharing data and communication power and bandwidth, identification must consider complexity as a critical limitation. Focusing on optimal resource allocation under a given reliability requirement, this paper studies identification complexity and its relations to decision making. Dynamic resource assignments are investigated. Algorithms are developed and their convergence properties are established, including strong convergence, almost sure convergence rate, and asymptotic normality. By a suitable design of resource updating step sizes, the algorithms are shown to achieve the CR lower bound asymptotically, and hence are asymptotically efficient. Illustrative examples demonstrate significant advantages of our real-time and individualized resource allocation methodologies over population-based worst-case strategies.