A novel procedure for cable damage identification of cable-stayed bridge using particle swarm optimization and machine learning

The cables are crucial components in the ensuring safety of the stayed-cable bridges. The early identification and quantification of cable damage based on the inherent structural health monitoring (SHM) system is a priority to prevent disasters. In this study, a procedure is proposed to identify the cable damage in the cable-stayed bridges using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the categorical gradient boosting (CatBoost) algorithm. The PSO-based finite element model updating method is implemented to establish the baseline model while a practical advanced analysis program is used to generate simulation data. As an efficient and up-to-date machine learning (ML) algorithm, CatBoost is utilized to capture the complex nonlinear correlations between the vibration characteristics and the cable damages. A case study of a benchmark bridge where cable damage has been identified is considered to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed procedure. The fivefold cross-validation and grid search methods are used to find the optimal model. The accuracy of the proposed cable damage identification model using CatBoost is also verified through the comparison with three existing ML methods: random forest, decision tree, and extreme gradient boosting. The identification results of both simulation and real cases of cable damage demonstrate that the proposed procedure is a novel and powerful approach for cable damage identification of the cable-stayed bridge using measurement data of the existing SHM system.