Enhancing Bayesian model updating in structural health monitoring via learnable mappings

In the context of structural health monitoring (SHM), the selection and extraction of damage-sensitive features from raw sensor recordings represent a critical step towards solving the inverse problem underlying the structural health identification. This work introduces a new way to enhance stochastic approaches to SHM through the use of deep neural networks. A learnable feature extractor and a feature-oriented surrogate model are synergistically exploited to evaluate a likelihood function within a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm. The feature extractor undergoes a supervised pairwise training to map sensor recordings onto a low-dimensional metric space, which encapsulates the sensitivity to structural health parameters. The surrogate model maps the structural health parameters onto their feature description. The procedure enables the updating of beliefs about structural health parameters, effectively replacing the need for a computationally expensive numerical (finite element) model. A preliminary offline phase involves the generation of a labeled dataset to train both the feature extractor and the surrogate model. Within a simulation-based SHM framework, training vibration responses are cost-effectively generated by means of a multi-fidelity surrogate modeling strategy to approximate sensor recordings under varying damage and operational conditions. The multi-fidelity surrogate exploits model order reduction and artificial neural networks to speed up the data generation phase while ensuring the damage-sensitivity of the approximated signals. The proposed strategy is assessed through three synthetic case studies, demonstrating remarkable results in terms of accuracy of the estimated quantities and computational efficiency.