A data fusion method for bridge displacement reconstruction based on LSTM networks

Bridge displacement contains vital information for bridge condition and performance. Due to the limits of direct displacement measurement methods, the indirect displacement reconstruction methods based on the strain or acceleration data are also developed in engineering applications. There are still some deficiencies of the displacement reconstruction methods based on strain or acceleration in practice. This paper proposed a novel method based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to reconstruct the bridge dynamic displacements with the strain and acceleration data source. The LSTM networks with three hidden layers are utilized to map the relationships between the measured responses and the bridge displacement. To achieve the data fusion, the input strain and acceleration data need to be preprocessed by normalization and then the corresponding dynamic displacement responses can be reconstructed by the LSTM networks. In the numerical simulation, the errors of the displacement reconstruction are below 9% for different load cases, and the proposed method is robust when the input strain and acceleration data contains additive noise. The hyper-parameter effect is analyzed and the displacement reconstruction accuracies of different machine learning methods are compared. For experimental verification, the errors are below 6% for the simply supported beam and continuous beam cases. Both the numerical and experimental results indicate that the proposed data fusion method can accurately reconstruct the displacement.