A Generative Adversarial Network Model for Simulating Various Types of Human-Induced Loads

Abstract

Severe vibrations may occur on slender structures like footbridges and cantilever stands due to human-induced loads such as walking, jumping or bouncing. Currently, to develop a load model for structural design, the main features, such as periodicity and stationarity of experimental load records, are artificially extracted and then mathematically modeled. Different physical features have been included in different load models, i.e. no unified load model exists for different individual activities. The recently emerged generative adversarial networks can be used to model high-dimensional random variables. The probability distribution of these variables learned from real samples can be used to generate new samples, avoiding extracting features artificially. In this paper, a new model is proposed which combines the conditional generative adversarial networks and Wasserstein generative adversarial networks with gradient penalty to generate individual walking, jumping and bouncing loads. The generator of the model has five fully connected layers and a one-dimensional convolutional layer, and the discriminator has five fully connected layers. After one million training steps using the experimental records, the generator can generate high-quality samples similar to real samples in waveform. Finally, by comparing the power spectral densities and single degree of freedom system’s responses of the generated samples with real samples, it is further proved that the proposed generative adversarial network model can be used to simulate various human-induced loads. Source code of the model along with its trained weights is provided to the readers to further analysis and application.