A Novel Harmony Search Cat Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Optimal Bridge Sensor Placement

Abstract

In the past three decades, many large span bridges have been built to meet the economic and social development, but due to environmental and overload factors that cause continuous damage and accelerate the aging of bridges, long-term monitoring of bridges is extremely important to ensure that bridges reach their designed service life as much as possible.The optimal placement of sensors is the most basic and essential part of the structural health monitoring (SHM) system because the good or bad sensor placement will directly affect the monitoring quality. To optimize the placement of sensors, in this paper, a novel algorithm for harmony search cat swarm optimization (HSCSO) is proposed by combining the harmony search (HS) algorithm. We confirm the usefulness of the algorithm by two types of simulations: first, three benchmark functions, and second, optimal placement of sensors based on engineering examples.The results show that whether for the three benchmark functions or the placement of sensor optimization based on engineering instances, our algorithm displays a more powerful global search capability, and to some extent solves the problem that the cat swarm optimization (CSO) algorithm is prone to fall into local optimal solutions, and has a faster convergence speed and less computation time.