Structural Damage Identification Using a Modified Directional Bat Algorithm

Abstract

Bat algorithm (BA) has been widely used to solve optimization problems in different fields. However, there are still some shortcomings of standard BA, such as premature convergence and lack of diversity. To solve this problem, a modified directional bat algorithm (MDBA) is proposed in this paper. Based on the directional bat algorithm (DBA), the individual optimal updating mechanism is employed to update a bat’s position by using its own optimal solution. Then, an elimination strategy is introduced to increase the diversity of the population, in which individuals with poor fitness values are eliminated, and new individuals are randomly generated. The proposed algorithm is applied to the structural damage identification and to an objective function composed of the actual modal information and the calculated modal information. Finally, the proposed MDBA is used to solve the damage detection of a beam-type bridge and a truss-type bridge, and the results are compared with those of other swarm intelligence algorithms and other variants of BA. The results show that in the case of the same small population number and few iterations, MDBA has more accurate identification and better convergence than other algorithms. Moreover, the study on anti-noise performance of the MDBA shows that the maximum relative error is only 5.64% at 5% noise level in the beam-type bridge, and 6.53% at 3% noise in the truss-type bridge, which shows good robustness.