Machine learning paradigm for structural health monitoring

Structural health diagnosis and prognosis is the goal of structural health monitoring. Vibration-based structural health monitoring methodology has been extensively investigated. However, the conventional vibration–based methods find it difficult to detect damages of actual structures because of a high incompleteness in the monitoring information (the number of sensors is much fewer with respect to the number of degrees of freedom of a structure), intense uncertainties in the structural conditions and monitoring systems, and coupled effects of damage and environmental actions on modal parameters. It is a truth that the performance and conditions of a structure must be embedded in the monitoring data (vehicles, wind, etc.; acceleration, displacement, cable force, strain, images, videos, etc.). Therefore, there is a need to develop completely novel structural health diagnosis and prognosis methodology based on the various monitoring data. Machine learning provides the advanced mathematical frameworks and algorithms that can help discover and model the performance and conditions of a structure through deep mining of monitoring data. Thus, machine learning takes an opportunity to establish novel machine learning paradigm for structural health diagnosis and prognosis theory termed the machine learning paradigm for structural health monitoring. This article sheds light on principles for machine learning paradigm for structural health monitoring with some examples and reviews the existing challenges and open questions in this field.