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Damage-sensitive features such as natural frequencies are widely used for structural health monitoring; however, they are also influenced by the environmental condition. To address the environmental effect, principal component analysis is widely used. Before performing principal component analysis, the training data should be defined for the normal condition (baseline model) under environmental variability. It is worth noting that the natural change of the normal condition may exist due to an intrinsic behavior of the structural system. Without accounting for the natural change of the normal condition, numerous false alarms occur. However, the natural change of the normal condition cannot be known in advance. Although the description of the normal condition has a significant influence on the monitoring performance, it has received much less attention. To capture the natural change of the normal condition and detect the damage simultaneously, an adaptive statistical process monitoring using online learning algorithm is proposed for output-only structural health monitoring. The novelty aspect of the proposed method is the adaptive learning capability by moving the window of the recent samples (from normal condition) to update the baseline model. In this way, the baseline model can reflect the natural change of the normal condition in environmental variability. To handle both change rate of the normal condition and non-linear dependency of the damage-sensitive features, a variable moving window strategy is also proposed. The variable moving window strategy is the block-wise linearization method using k-means clustering based on Linde–Buzo–Gray algorithm and Bayesian information criterion. The proposed method and two existing methods (static linear principal component analysis and incremental linear principal component analysis) were applied to a full-scale bridge structure, which was artificially damaged at the end of the long-term monitoring. Among the three methods, the proposed method is the only successful method to deal with the non-linear dependency among features and detect the structural damage timely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By virtue of the advances in sensing techniques, finite element (FE) model updating (FEMU) using static and dynamic data has been recently employed to improve identification on updating parameters. Using heterogeneous data can provide useful information to improve parameter identifiability in FEMU. It is worth noting that the useful information from the heterogeneous data may be diluted in the conventional FEM framework. The conventional FEMU framework in previous studies have used heterogeneous data at once to compute residuals in the objective function, and they are condensed to be a scalar. In this implementation, it should be careful to formulate the objective function with proper weighting factors to consider the scale of measurement and relative significances. Otherwise, the information from heterogeneous data cannot be efficiently utilized. For FEMU of the bridge, parameter compensation may exist due to mutual dependence among updating parameters. This aggravates the parameter identifiability to make the results of the FEMU worse. To address the limitation of the conventional FEMU method, this study proposes a sequential framework for the FEMU of existing bridges. The proposed FEMU method uses two steps to utilize static and dynamic data in a sequential manner. By using them separately, the influence of the parameter compensation can be suppressed. The proposed FEMU method is verified through numerical and experimental study. Through these verifications, the limitation of the conventional FEMU method is investigated in terms of parameter identifiability and predictive performance. The proposed FEMU method shows much smaller variabilities in the updating parameters than the conventional one by providing the better predictions than those of the conventional one in calibration and validation data. Based on numerical and experimental study, the proposed FEMU method can improve the parameter identifiability using the heterogeneous data and it seems to be promising and efficient framework for FEMU of the existing bridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]