Although the research on Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) started longer time ago, the first industrial applications are probably around 10 years old. Commercial software implementations made the technology accessible to industry. In these 10 years, an evolution of the technology took place with a selection of these methods from the system identification community that provided added value to the specific modal analysis application.
OMA algorithms evolved from peakpicking concepts to advanced frequency-domain estimators, from difficult non-linear time-domain methods identifying ARMA models to powerful linear stochastic subspace identification method identifying state-space models. Also an evolution in usability took place: the use of stabilization diagrams, development of well stabilizing methods, automation of the parameter estimation process.
