Multi-Role collaborative framework for structural damage identification considering measurement noise effect

Swarm intelligence has been extensively applied in structural damage identification, but a single method may not perform well in identification, especially using limited and noised vibration data. In this context, the objective landscape of the formulated identification problem is often ill-posed, indicating the optimized landscape is filled with many local optimal points. If the algorithm gets trapped in local optimal points, it will not obtain satisfactory identification results. To address this issue, this study introduces the sparse regularization technique to construct a well-posed objective function. Furthermore, a novel multi-role collaborative framework is proposed, which integrates different swarm intelligent and enables the individual in the algorithm to switch different roles, meaning employing different updating strategies, for the demands of different identification cases. Therefore, a more accurate identification results can be obtained. A series of numerical simulations and a laboratory validation on a box-section beam with multiple notches are carried out. The features of multi-role adaptive mechanism and diversity search strategies in the proposed framework guarantee its advantages and superiority on obtaining better identifications compared with single swarm intelligence algorithm, providing a new way in developing high-efficiency model updating and damage detection algorithms.