Vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) is crucial for the dynamic maintenance of civil building structures to protect property security and the lives of the public. Analyzing these vibrations with modern artificial intelligence and deep learning (DL) methods is a new trend. This paper proposed an unsupervised deep learning method based on a convolutional autoencoder (CAE), which can overcome the limitations of conventional supervised deep learning. With the convolutional core applied to the DL network, the method can extract features self-adaptively and efficiently. The effectiveness of the method in detecting damage is then tested using a benchmark model. Thereafter, this method is used to detect damage and instant disaster events in a rubber bearing-isolated gymnasium structure. The results indicate that the method enables the CAE network to learn the intact vibrations, so as to distinguish between different damage states of the benchmark model, and the outcome meets the high-dimensional data distribution characteristics visualized by the t-SNE method. Besides, the CAE-based network trained with daily vibrations of the isolating layer in the gymnasium can precisely recover newly collected vibration and detect the occurrence of the ground motion. The proposed method is effective at identifying nonlinear variations in the dynamic responses and has the potential to be used for structural condition assessment and safety warning.

Optimal life-cycle management is a challenging issue for deteriorating regional bridges. Due to the complexity of regional bridge structural conditions and a large number of inspection and maintenance actions, decision-makers generally choose traditional passive management strategies. They are less efficiency and cost-effectiveness. This paper suggests a deep reinforcement learning framework employing double-deep Q-networks (DDQNs) to improve the life-cycle management of deteriorating regional bridges to tackle these problems. It could produce optimal maintenance plans considering restrictions to maximize maintenance cost-effectiveness to the greatest extent possible. DDQNs method could handle the problem of the overestimation of Q-values in the Nature DQNs. This study also identifies regional bridge deterioration characteristics and the consequence of scheduled maintenance from years of inspection data. To validate the proposed method, a case study containing hundreds of bridges is used to develop optimal life-cycle management strategies. The optimization solutions recommend fewer replacement actions and prefer preventative repair actions when bridges are damaged or are expected to be damaged. By employing the optimal life-cycle regional maintenance strategies, the conditions of bridges can be controlled to a good level. Compared to the nature DQNs, DDQNs offer an optimized scheme containing fewer low-condition bridges and a more costeffective life-cycle management plan.

In this paper, a multi-objective wireless sensor network configuration optimization method is proposed. The proposed method aims to determine the optimal information and lifespan wireless sensor network for structural health monitoring of large-scale infrastructures. In particular, cluster-based wireless sensor networks with multi-type of sensors are considered. To optimize the lifetime of the wireless sensor network, a cluster-based network optimization algorithm that optimizes the arrangement of cluster heads and base station is developed. On the other hand, based on the Bayesian inference, the uncertainty of the estimated parameters can be quantified. The coefficient of variance of the estimated parameters can be obtained, which is utilized as a holistic measure to evaluate the estimation accuracy of sensor configurations with multi-type of sensors. The proposed method provides the optimal wireless sensor network configuration that satisfies the required estimation accuracy with the longest lifetime. The proposed method is illustrated by designing the optimal wireless sensor network configuration of a cable-stayed bridge and a space truss.

The prediction of structural mechanical behaviors is vital important to early perceive the abnormal conditions and avoid the occurrence of disasters. Especially for underground engineering, complex geological conditions make the structure more prone to disasters. Aiming at solving the problems existing in previous studies, such as incomplete consideration factors and can only predict the continuous performance, the deep attention fused temporal convolution network (DATCN) is proposed in this paper to predict the spatial mechanical behaviors of structure, which integrates both the temporal effect and spatial effect and realize the cross-time prediction. The temporal convolution network (TCN) and self-attention mechanism are employed to learn the temporal correlation of each monitoring point and the spatial correlation among different points, respectively. Then, the predicted result obtained from DATCN is compared with that obtained from some classical baselines, including SVR, LR, MLP, and RNNs. Also, the parameters involved in DATCN are discussed to optimize the prediction ability. The prediction result demonstrates that the proposed DATCN model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. The prediction accuracy of DATCN model after 24 hours reaches 90 percent. Also, the performance in last 14 hours plays a domain role to predict the short-term behaviors of the structure. As a study case, the proposed model is applied in an underwater shield tunnel to predict the stress variation of concrete segments in space.

Guaranteeing the quality and integrity of structural health monitoring (SHM) data is very important for an effective assessment of structural condition. However, sensory system may malfunction due to sensor fault or harsh operational environment, resulting in multiple types of data anomaly existing in the measured data. Efficiently and automatically identifying anomalies from the vast amounts of measured data is significant for assessing the structural conditions and early warning for structural failure in SHM. The major challenges of current automated data anomaly detection methods are the imbalance of dataset categories. In terms of the feature of actual anomalous data, this paper proposes a data anomaly detection method based on data-level and deep learning technique for SHM of civil engineering structures. The proposed method consists of a data balancing phase to prepare a comprehensive training dataset based on data-level technique, and an anomaly detection phase based on a sophisticatedly designed network. The advanced densely connected convolutional network (DenseNet) and Transformer encoder are embedded in the specific network to facilitate extraction of both detail and global features of response data, and to establish the mapping between the highest level of abstractive features and data anomaly class. Numerical studies on a steel frame model are conducted to evaluate the performance and noise immunity of using the proposed network for data anomaly detection. The applicability of the proposed method for data anomaly classification is validated with the measured data of a practical supertall structure. The proposed method presents a remarkable performance on data anomaly detection, which reaches a 95.7% overall accuracy with practical engineering structural monitoring data, which demonstrates the effectiveness of data balancing and the robust classification capability of the proposed network.

Recent years, direct displacement-based design (DDBD) procedure is proposed for the design of un-bonded posttensioned (UPT) concrete wall systems. In the DDBD procedure, the determination of the equivalent viscous damping (EVD) ratio is critical since it would influence the strength demand of the UPT wall systems. Nevertheless, the influence of EVD ratio determination of the UPT wall systems were not thoroughly evaluated. This study was aimed to investigate the influence of different EVD ratio determinations on the DDBD procedure of UPT wall systems. Case study structures with four, twelve and twenty storeys have been designed with DDBD procedure considering different EVD ratio determinations. Nonlinear time history analysis was performed to validate the design results of those UPT wall systems. And the simulation results showed that the global responses of the case study structures were influenced by the EVD ratio determination.

This study aims at numerically and experimentally investigating torsional guided wave mixing with weak material nonlinearity under acoustoelastic effect in tubular structures. The acoustoelastic effect on single central frequency guided wave propagation in structures has been well-established. However, the acoustoelastic on guided wave mixing has not been fully explored. This study employs a three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model to simulate the effect of stress on guided wave mixing in tubular structures. The nonlinear strain energy function and theory of incremental deformation are implemented in the 3D FE model to simulate the guided wave mixing with weak material nonlinearity under acoustoelastic effect. Experiments are carried out to measure the nonlinear features, such as combinational harmonics and second harmonics in related to different levels of applied stresses. The experimental results are compared with the 3D FE simulation. The results show that the generation combinational harmonic at sum frequency provides valuable stress information for tubular structures, and also useful for damage diagnosis. The findings of this study provide physical insights into the effect of applied stresses on the combinational harmonic generation due to wave mixing. The results are important for applying the guided wave mixing for in-situ monitoring of structures, which are subjected to different levels of loadings under operational condition.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) researchers have identified Augmented Reality (AR) as a new technology that can assist inspections. Post-seismic structural inspections are conducted to evaluate the safety level of the damaged structures. Quantification of nearby structural changes over short-term and long-term periods can provide building inspectors with information to improve their safety. This paper proposes a Time Machine Measure (TMM) application based on an Augmented Reality (AR) Head-Mounted-Device (HMD) platform. The primary function of TMM is to restore the saved meshes of a past environment and overlay them onto the real environment so that inspectors can intuitively measure dynamic structural deformation and other environmental movements. The proposed TMM application was verified by demo experiments simulating a real inspection environment.

Stayed cables are the key components for transmitting loads in cable-stayed bridges. Therefore, it is very important to evaluate the cable force condition to ensure bridge safety. An online condition assessment and anomaly localization method is proposed for cables based on the spatiotemporal correlation of grouped cable forces. First, an anomaly sensitive feature index is obtained based on the distribution characteristics of grouped cable forces. Second, an adaptive anomaly detection method based on the k-nearest neighbor rule is used to perform dissimilarity measurements on the extracted feature index, and such a method can effectively remove the interference of environment factors and vehicle loads on online condition assessment of the grouped cable forces. Furthermore, an online anomaly isolation and localization method for stay cables is established, and the complete decomposition contributions method is used to decompose the feature matrix of the grouped cable forces and build an anomaly isolation index. Finally, case studies were carried out to validate the proposed method using an in-service cable-stayed bridge equipped with a structural health monitoring system. The results show that the proposed approach is sensitive to the abnormal distribution of grouped cable forces and is robust to the influence of interference factors. In addition, the proposed approach can also localize the cables with abnormal cable forces online, which can be successfully applied to the field monitoring of cables for cable-stayed bridges.

Deep learning algorithms for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) have been extracting the interest of researchers and engineers. These algorithms commonly used loss functions and evaluation indices like the mean square error (MSE) which were not originally designed for SHM problems. An updated loss function which was specifically constructed for deep-learning-based structural damage detection problems has been proposed in this study. By tuning the coefficients of the loss function, the weights for damage localization and quantification can be adapted to the real situation and the deep learning network can avoid unnecessary iterations on damage localization and focus on the damage severity identification. To prove efficiency of the proposed method, structural damage detection using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) was conducted on a truss bridge model. Results showed that the validation curve with the updated loss function converged faster than the traditional MSE. Data augmentation was conducted to improve the anti-noise ability of the proposed method. For reducing the training time, the normalized modal strain energy change (NMSEC) was extracted, and the principal component analysis (PCA) was adopted for dimension reduction. The results showed that the training time was reduced by 90% and the damage identification accuracy could also have a slight increase. Furthermore, the effect of different modes and elements on the training dataset was also analyzed. The proposed method could greatly improve the performance for structural damage detection on both the training time and detection accuracy.

Inevitable response loss under complex operational conditions significantly affects the integrity and quality of measured data, leading the structural health monitoring (SHM) ineffective. To remedy the impact of data loss, a common way is to transfer the recorded response of available measure point to where the data loss occurred by establishing the response mapping from measured data. However, the current research has yet addressed the structural condition changes afterward and response mapping learning from a small sample. So, this paper proposes a novel data driven structural response reconstruction method based on a sophisticated designed generating adversarial network (UAGAN). Advanced deep learning techniques including U-shaped dense blocks, self-attention and a customized loss function are specialized and embedded in UAGAN to improve the universal and representative features extraction and generalized responses mapping establishment. In numerical validation, UAGAN efficiently and accurately captures the distinguished features of structural response from only 40 training samples of the intact structure. Besides, the established response mapping is universal, which effectively reconstructs responses of the structure suffered up to 10% random stiffness reduction or structural damage. In the experimental validation, UAGAN is trained with ambient response and applied to reconstruct response measured under earthquake. The reconstruction losses of response in the time and frequency domains reached 16% and 17%, that is better than the previous research, demonstrating the leading performance of the sophisticated designed network. In addition, the identified modal parameters from reconstructed and the corresponding true responses are highly consistent indicates that the proposed UAGAN is very potential to be applied to practical civil engineering.