Comparative studies of metamodeling and AI-Based techniques in damage detection of structures

Abstract Despite advances in computer capacity, the enormous computational cost of running complex engineering simulations makes it impractical to rely exclusively on simulation for the purpose of structural health monitoring. To cut down the cost, surrogate models, also known as metamodels, are constructed and then used in place of the actual simulation models. In this study, structural damage detection is performed using two approaches. In both cases ten popular metamodeling techniques including Back-Propagation Neural Networks (BPNN), Least Square Support Vector Machines (LS-SVMs), Adaptive Neural-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Radial Basis Function Neural network (RBFN), Large Margin Nearest Neighbors (LMNN), Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), Gaussian Process (GP), Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS), Random Forests and Kriging are used and the comparative results are presented. In the first approach, by considering dynamic behavior of a structure as input variables, ten metamodels are constructed, trained and tested to detect the location and severity of damage in civil structures. The variation of running time, mean square error (MSE), number of training and testing data, and other indices for measuring the accuracy in the prediction are defined and calculated in order to inspect advantages as well as the shortcomings of each algorithm. The results indicate that Kriging and LS-SVM models have better performance in predicting the location/severity of damage compared with other methods. In the second approach, after locating precisely the eventual damage of a structure using modal strain energy based index (MSEBI), to efficiently reduce the computational cost of model updating during the optimization process of damage severity detection, the MSEBI of structural elements is evaluated using a properly trained surrogate model. The results indicate that after determining the damage location, the proposed solution method for damage severity detection leads to significant reduction of computational time compared to finite element method. Furthermore, engaging colliding bodies optimization algorithm (CBO) by efficient surrogate model of finite element (FE) model, maintains the acceptable accuracy of damage severity detection.