ABSTRACT
Employing direct structural analyses by means of introducing soft computing methods, a damage detection approach using traffic-induced vibration data of the bridge is developed in this study. Different from identifying the structural damages using inverse analyses, the possible damage patterns of the bridge are assumed according to theoretical and empirical considerations at first. Then, the running vehicle-induced dynamic responses of the bridge under a certain damage pattern are calculated employing a developed vehiclebridge interaction analysis procedure. When the calculated response is identical to the recorded one, this damage pattern will be the solution. However, owing to the large number of damage patterns, it is difficult to identify the exact solution. Therefore in this approach, the optimization method of Genetic Algorithm is applied to identify the damage pattern. The feasibility investigation of the proposed approach is investigated using numerical models in this paper.
