Structural damage identification of truss structures using self-controlled multi-stage particle swarm optimization

The present work proposes a self-controlled multi-stage optimization method for damage identification of structures utilizing standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Damage identification problem is formulated as an inverse optimization problem where damage severity in each element of the structure is considered as optimization variables. An efficient objective function is formed using the first few frequencies and mode shapes of the structure. This objective function is minimized by a self-controlled multi-stage strategy to identify and quantify the damage extent of the structural members. In the first stage, standard PSO is utilized to get an initial solution to the problem. Subsequently, the algorithm identifies the most damage-prone elements of the structure using an adaptable threshold value of damage severity. These identified elements are included in the search space of the standard PSO at the next stage. Thus, the algorithm reduces the dimension of the search space and subsequently increases the accuracy of damage prediction with a considerable reduction in computational cost. The efficiency of the proposed method is investigated and compared with available results through three numerical examples considering both with and without noise. The obtained results demonstrate the accuracy of the present method can accurately estimate the location and severity of multi-damage cases in the structural systems with less computational cost.