Regularization in moving force identification

Several methods have been developed to identify forces moving on a beam from measured responses. The results from all of them exhibit fluctuations at the beginning and end of the time history, and they are results of the ill-conditioned inverse problem. This paper includes a regularization method in the solution of the problem with the aim to explore the feasibility of collecting vehicle weight in the weigh-in-motion application. The improvements through regularization to the identified forces using different measured responses are studied with simulation, and the identified forces in the laboratory study obtained from two different existing moving force identification methods are compared. The studies show that the indirect estimation of vehicle weight from dynamic responses is feasible, and further improvements could be achieved with preprocessing of the measured data to reduce the measurement noise.