Optimization-based method for structural damage detection with consideration of uncertainties- a comparative study

Abstract

In this paper, for efficiently reducing the computational cost of the model updating during the optimization process of damage detection, the structural response is evaluated using properly trained surrogate model. Furthermore, in practice uncertainties in the FE model parameters and modelling errors are inevitable. Hence, an efficient approach based on Monte Carlo simulation is proposed to take into account the effect of uncertainties in developing a surrogate model. The probability of damage existence (PDE) is calculated based on the probability density function of the existence of undamaged and damaged states. The current work builds a framework for Probability Based Damage Detection (PBDD) of structures based on the best combination of metaheuristic optimization algorithm and surrogate models. To reach this goal, three popular metamodeling techniques including Cascade Feed Forward Neural Network (CFNN), Least Square Support Vector Machines (LS-SVMs) and Kriging are constructed, trained and tested in order to inspect features and faults of each algorithm. Furthermore, three well-known optimization algorithms including Ideal Gas Molecular Movement (IGMM), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Bat Algorithm (BA) are utilized and the comparative results are presented accordingly. Furthermore, efficient schemes are implemented on these algorithms to improve their performance in handling problems with a large number of variables. By considering various indices for measuring the accuracy and computational time of PBDD process, the results indicate that combination of LS-SVM surrogate model by IGMM optimization algorithm have better performance in predicting the of damage compared with other methods.