A Deep Neural Network, Multi-fidelity Surrogate Model Approach for Bayesian Model Updating in SHM

This paper presents a methodology to move toward reliable real-time structural health monitoring (SHM). The proposed procedure relies upon surrogate modeling based on a multi-fidelity (MF) deep neural network (DNN), conceived to map damage and operational parameters onto sensor recordings. Within a stochastic framework, the MFDNN is adopted by a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling procedure to update the probability distribution of the structural state, conditioned on noisy observations. The MF-DNN enables to locate and possibly quantify the presence of damage, and its multi-fidelity configuration effectively blends datasets featuring different fidelities without any prior assumption. The training datasets are generated with physics-based models of the monitored structure: high fidelity (HF) and low fidelity (LF) models are considered to simulate the structural response under varying operational conditions, respectively in the presence or absence of a structural damage. The MF-DNN is a composition of a fully-connected LF-DNN, which mimics sensor recordings in the undamaged condition, and of a long short-term memory HF-DNN, which is exploited to enrich the LF approximation for the considered damaged scenarios. By framing the model updating strategy as an incremental or residual modeling problem, the MF-DNN is reported to provide numerous advantages over single-fidelity based models for SHM purposes.