Structural damage identification based on continuous ant colony optimization for cantilever-type structures

In this paper, the damage detection problem is formulated as an optimization problem such as to obtain the minimum difference between the numerical and experimental variables, and then a modified ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed for solving this optimization problem. The structural damage in the shear buildings are detected by using dynamically measured flexibility matrix, since the flexibility matrix of the structure can be estimated from only the first few modes. The continuous version of ACO is employed as a probabilistic technique for solving this computational problem, which can be reduced to find good paths through solution graphs. Compared to classical methods, one of the main strengths of this meta-heuristic method is the generally better robustness in achieving global optimum. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by numerical example. The proposed method enables the deduction of the extent and location of structural damage, while using short computational time and resulting good accuracy.