Abstract:
Engineers and scientists are often faced with the problem of objectively comparing
time histories of measured and/or simulated data. This article presents a reliable and
intuitive validation metric for use in the validation process. The proposed validation
metric is able to quantify the agreement/disagreement between deterministic system
response quantities of interest obtained from measurements on a physical system and
predictions from a mathematical model. The validation metric is based on the relative
error, and the challenges concerning the use of the relative error on periodic signals
are addressed. The validation metric is compared to similar metrics and their advantages
and limitations are discussed. The results show that the proposed validation metric
gives a comprehensive error that is able to quantify the agreement between two periodic
signals and is easily interpretable.