Decision Fusion for Structural Damage Detection: Numerical and Experimental Studies

This paper describes a decision fusion strategy that can integrate multiple individual damage detection measures to form a new measure, and the new measure has higher probability of correct detection than any individual measure. The method to compute the probability of correct selection is presented to measure the system performance of the fusion system that includes the presented fusion strategy. And parametric sensitive studies on system performance are also conducted. The superiority of the fusion strategy herein is that it can be extended to deal with the multiresolution subdecision or blind adaptive detection, and corresponding methodologies are also provided. Finally, an experimental setup was fabricated, whereby the vibration properties of damaged and undamaged structures were measured. The experimental results with the undamaged structural model provide information for producing an improved theoretical and numerical model via model updating techniques. Three existing vibration-based damage detection methods with varied resolutions were utilized to identify the damage that occurred in the structure, based on the experimental results. Then the decision fusion strategy was implemented to join the subdecisions from these three methods. The fused results are shown to be superior to those from single method.