Structural Damage Identification Using an Adaptive Multi-stage Optimization Method Based on a Modified Particle Swarm Algorithm

An adaptive multi-stage optimization method utilizing a modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) is proposed here to identify the multiple damage cases of structural systems. First the structural damage problem is defined as a standard optimization problem. An efficient objective function considering the first few natural frequencies of a structure, before and after damage, is utilized for optimization. A modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) dealing with real values of damage variables is introduced to solve the optimization problem. In order to assess the performance of the proposed method, some illustrative examples with and without considering the measurement noise are tested. Numerical results demonstrate the high accuracy of the method proposed for determining the site and severity of multiple damage cases in the structural systems.