Inverse identification of the pedestrian characteristics governing human-structure interaction

Abstract The further development and improvement of prediction models for human-induced vibrations of footbridges requires detailed and accurate information on representative operational loading data. As direct force measurements are practically infeasible when a large number of pedestrians is involved, this paper proposes an inverse method to estimate the parameters that govern human-structure interaction from the resulting structural response. The parameters of interest concern the dynamic characteristics of a single-degree-of-freedom system, applied to describe the mechanical interaction between the pedestrian and the structure. The parameter estimation procedure assumes that the dynamic behaviour of the emtpy structure and the distribution of step frequencies in the crowd are known. The dynamic characteristics of the considered interaction model are estimated by minimizing the discrepancy between the observed and the simulated power spectral density of the structural response. The proposed approach is verified using numerical simulations.