Structural damage identification based on rough sets and artificial neural network

This paper investigates potential applications of the rough sets (RS) theory and artificial neural network (ANN) method on structural damage detection. An information entropy based discretization algorithm in RS is applied for dimension reduction of the original damage database obtained from finite element analysis (FEA). The proposed approach is tested with a 14-bay steel truss model for structural damage detection. The experimental results show that the damage features can be extracted efficiently from the combined utilization of RS and ANN methods even the volume of measurement data is enormous and with uncertainties.