Design oriented identification of critical times in transient response

Two techniques are presented for reducing the computational effort in identifying the critical time points. One approach is an adaptive search technique, well suited for the case where the response is exactly known. The other technique, useful for noisy response, is based on a least-squares spline approximation of the response. The possibility of grouping several closely spaced local peaks to identify a single super peak from each group is also investigated. The computational efficiency of the techniques proposed here is illustrated by two examples.