A novel heuristic search algorithm for optimization with application to structural damage identification

One of the most recent methods of structural damage identification is using the difference between structures responses after and before damage occurrence. To do this one can formulate the damage detection problem as an inverse optimization problem where the extents of damage in each element are considered as the optimizations variables. To optimize the objective function, heuristic methods such as GA, PSO etc. are widely utilized. In this paper, inspired by animals such as bat, dolphin, oilbird, shrew etc. that use echolocation for finding food, a new and efficient method, called Echolocation Search Algorithm (ESA), is proposed to properly identify the site and extent of multiple damage cases in structural systems. Numerical results show that the proposed method can reliably determine the location and severity of multiple damage cases in structural systems.