Saleheh Gerist - PhD candidate of structural engineering, Environmental and civil department, Shiraz University,
Mahmoud Reza Maheri - Professor, Environmental and civil department, Shiraz University,

Damage detection techniques are one of the most active fields of research that attracted a lot of interest in the recent years. The imperialist competitive algorithm was developed over the last few years as a meta-heuristic algorithm using socio-politically motivated optimization strategy to solve optimization problems and is employed to solve the damage detection problem in this paper. Three different objective functions are selected and calculated using the first few modal responses: 1) the norm of difference of analytical and real damaged structure, 2) the multiple damage location assurance criterion (MDLAC) value using the natural frequencies, 3) minimizing the error value calculated based on the eigen-equation. This strategy is numerically applied to a cantilever beam and a steel frame for offshore application. The results are compared with other methods and demonstrate the efficiency and high speed of the proposed algorithm in identifying the damage locations and extents.

Damage detection, Modal analysis, Imperialist Competitive Algorithm, Meta-heuristic algorithm, Eigen equation