Near-Real-Time Identification of Seismic Damage Using Unsupervised Deep Neural Network

Prompt identification of structural damage is essential for effective postdisaster responses. To this end, this paper proposes a deep neural network (DNN)-based framework to identify seismic damage based on structural response data recorded during an earthquake event. The DNN in the proposed framework is constructed by Variational Autoencoder, which is one of the self-supervised DNNs that can construct the continuous latent space of the input data by learning probabilistic characteristics. The DNN is trained using the flexibility matrices obtained by operational modal analysis (OMA) of simulated structural responses of the target structure under the undamaged state. To consider the load-dependency of OMA results, the undamaged state of the structure is represented by the flexibility matrix, which is closest to that obtained from the measured seismic response in the latent space. The seismic damage of each member is then estimated based on the difference between the two matrices using the flexibility disassembly method. As a numerical example, the proposed method is applied to a 5-story, 5-bay steel frame structure for which structural analyses are first performed under artificial ground motions to create train and test datasets. The proposed framework is verified with the near-real-time simulation using ground motions of El Centro and Kobe earthquakes. The example demonstrates that the proposed DNN-based method can identify seismic damage accurately in near-real-time.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a DNN-based framework to identify seismic damage based on structural response data. The DNN is trained to estimate the undamaged state of the structure and the seismic damage of each member using the flexibility disassembly method. The numerical example demonstrates the accuracy and real-time capability of the proposed method.