Dempster-Shafer evidence theory approach to structural damage detection

In this study, the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory-based approach for structural damage detection is presented. First, the damage basic probability assignment (BPA) function of substructures using each data set measured from the monitored structure is calculated. Then, the D-S evidence theory is employed to combine the individual damage BPAs in order to reach the final damage detection results. To reduce the computational cost of this method when used in complex structures, the preliminary damage range is first localized by modal strain energy method. An experimental investigation on a 20-bay rigid truss structure is carried out to illustrate the identified ability of the proposed approach with considering the uncertainty of model and measurement noise. The results indicate that the damage detection results obtained by combining the damage BPAs from each test data are better than the individual results obtained by each test data separately.