This Phase I Small Business Research Innovation Project focuses on the development of a state of the art parameter estimation code. Many phenomena in science and engineering are described by systems of ordinary linear differential equations (ODEs). Often, although it is possible to write out the equations which govern the system, the coefficients or parameters which describe the rate of the various processes are unknown. If the researcher has data describing the operation of the system, these parameters can be determined from the data. This process is called parameter estimation. Parameter estimation problems are common in many areas, including chemical kinetics and thermodynamics, biology, epidemiology and control theory. Unfortunately, not only are such problems extremely difficult to solve in practice, but there is no robust public domain or commercial code available. Thus, the objective of this project is to demonstrate that a method known as `domain decomposition` is considerably more robust than the current standard method `the black box method`, that the code can be written so that the user does not have to be a parameter estimation expert, and that the code can be run on a standard PC.
