Optimal placement of sensors for structural system identification and health monitoring using a hybrid swarm intelligence technique

Abstract

Setting up a health monitoring system for large-scale civil engineering structures requires a large number of sensors and the placement of these sensors is of great significance for such spatially separated large structures. In this paper, we present an optimal sensor placement (OSP) algorithm by treating OSP as a combinatorial optimization problem which is solved using a swarm intelligence technique called particle swarm optimization (PSO). We propose a new hybrid PSO algorithm by combining a self-configurable PSO with the Nelder–Mead algorithm to solve this rather difficult combinatorial problem of OSP. The proposed algorithm aims precisely to achieve the best identification of modal frequencies and mode shapes. Numerical experiments have been carried out by considering civil engineering structures to evaluate the performance of the proposed swarm-intelligence-based OSP algorithm. Numerical studies indicate that the proposed hybrid PSO algorithm generates sensor configurations superior to the conventional iterative information-based approaches which have been popularly used for large structures. Further, the proposed hybrid PSO algorithm exhibits superior convergence characteristics when compared to other PSO counterparts.