Robustness had become in past years a central issue in system and control theory, focusing the attention of researchers from the study of a single model to the investigation of a set of models, described by a set of perturbations of a "nominal" model. Such a set, often indicated as an uncertainty model set or model set for short, has to be suitably constructed to describe the inherent uncertainty about the system under consideration and to be used for analysis and design purposes. H-infinity identification methods deliver uncertainty model sets in a suitable form to be used by well-established robust design techniques, based on H-infinity or mu optimization methods. The literature on H-infinity identification is now very extensive. In this paper, some of the most relevant contributions related to assumption validation, evaluation of bounds on unmodeled dynamics, convergence analysis and optimality properties of linear, two-stage and interpolatory algorithms are surveyed from a deterministic point of view. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.