• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.30 no.6
• /
• pp.613-626
• /
• 2022

Guaranteeing the quality and integrity of structural health monitoring (SHM) data is very important for an effective assessment of structural condition. However, sensory system may malfunction due to sensor fault or harsh operational environment, resulting in multiple types of data anomaly existing in the measured data. Efficiently and automatically identifying anomalies from the vast amounts of measured data is significant for assessing the structural conditions and early warning for structural failure in SHM. The major challenges of current automated data anomaly detection methods are the imbalance of dataset categories. In terms of the feature of actual anomalous data, this paper proposes a data anomaly detection method based on data-level and deep learning technique for SHM of civil engineering structures. The proposed method consists of a data balancing phase to prepare a comprehensive training dataset based on data-level technique, and an anomaly detection phase based on a sophisticatedly designed network. The advanced densely connected convolutional network (DenseNet) and Transformer encoder are embedded in the specific network to facilitate extraction of both detail and global features of response data, and to establish the mapping between the highest level of abstractive features and data anomaly class. Numerical studies on a steel frame model are conducted to evaluate the performance and noise immunity of using the proposed network for data anomaly detection. The applicability of the proposed method for data anomaly classification is validated with the measured data of a practical supertall structure. The proposed method presents a remarkable performance on data anomaly detection, which reaches a 95.7% overall accuracy with practical engineering structural monitoring data, which demonstrates the effectiveness of data balancing and the robust classification capability of the proposed network.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.129-140
• /
• 2022

The effectiveness of system identification, damage detection, condition assessment and other structural analyses relies heavily on the accuracy and reliability of the measured data in structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. However, data anomalies often occur in SHM systems, leading to inaccurate and untrustworthy analysis results. Therefore, anomalies in the raw data should be detected and cleansed before further analysis. Previous studies on data anomaly detection mainly focused on just single type of data anomaly for denoising or removing outliers, meanwhile, the existing methods of detecting multiple data anomalies are usually time consuming. For these reasons, recognising multiple anomaly patterns for real-time alarm and analysis in field monitoring remains a challenge. Aiming to achieve an efficient and accurate detection for multi-type data anomalies for field SHM, this study proposes a pattern-recognition-based data anomaly detection method that mainly consists of three steps: the feature extraction from the long time-series data samples, the training of a pattern recognition neural network (PRNN) using the features and finally the detection of data anomalies. The feature extraction step remarkably reduces the time cost of the network training, making the detection process very fast. The performance of the proposed method is verified on the basis of the SHM data of two practical long-span bridges. Results indicate that the proposed method recognises multiple data anomalies with very high accuracy and low calculation cost, demonstrating its applicability in field monitoring.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.31 no.2
• /
• pp.183-197
• /
• 2023

For long-span bridges with a structural health monitoring (SHM) system, environmental temperature-driven responses are proved to be a main component in measurements. However, anomalous structural behavior may be hidden incomplicated recorded data. In order to receive reliable assessment of structural performance, it is important to study therelationship between temperature and monitoring data. This paper presents an application of the cointegration based methodology to detect anomalies that may be masked by temperature effects and then forecast the temperature-induced deflection (TID) of long-span suspension bridges. Firstly, temperature effects on girder deflection are analyzed with fieldmeasured data of a suspension bridge. Subsequently, the cointegration testing procedure is conducted. A threshold-based anomaly detection framework that eliminates the influence of environmental temperature is also proposed. The cointegrated residual series is extracted as the index to monitor anomaly events in bridges. Then, wavelet separation method is used to obtain TIDs from recorded data. Combining cointegration theory with autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model, TIDs for longspan bridges are modeled and forecasted. Finally, in-situ measurements of Xihoumen Bridge are adopted as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the cointegration based approach. In conclusion, the proposed method is practical for actual structures which ensures the efficient management and maintenance based on monitoring data.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.63-75
• /
• 2022

The raw data collected by structural health monitoring (SHM) systems may suffer multiple patterns of anomalies, which pose a significant barrier for an automatic and accurate structural condition assessment. Therefore, the detection and classification of these anomalies is an essential pre-processing step for SHM systems. However, the heterogeneous data patterns, scarce anomalous samples and severe class imbalance make data anomaly detection difficult. In this regard, this study proposes a convolutional neural network-based data anomaly detection method. The time and frequency domains data are transferred as images and used as the input of the neural network for training. ResNet18 is adopted as the feature extractor to avoid training with massive labelled data. In addition, the focal loss function is adopted to soften the class imbalance-induced classification bias. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using acceleration data collected in a long-span cable-stayed bridge. The proposed approach detects and classifies data anomalies with high accuracy.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.32 no.3
• /
• pp.179-193
• /
• 2023

This study explores an alternative to the existing centralized process for data anomaly detection in modern Internet of Things (IoT)-based structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. An edge intelligence framework is proposed for the early detection and classification of various data anomalies facilitating quality enhancement of acquired data before transmitting to a central system. State-of-the-art deep neural network pruning techniques are investigated and compared aiming to significantly reduce the network size so that it can run efficiently on resource-constrained edge devices such as wireless smart sensors. Further, depthwise separable convolution (DSC) is invoked, the integration of which with advanced structural pruning methods exhibited superior compression capability. Last but not least, quantization-aware training (QAT) is adopted for faster processing and lower memory and power consumption. The proposed edge intelligence framework will eventually lead to reduced network overload and latency. This will enable intelligent self-adaptation strategies to be employed to timely deal with a faulty sensor, minimizing the wasteful use of power, memory, and other resources in wireless smart sensors, increasing efficiency, and reducing maintenance costs for modern smart SHM systems. This study presents a theoretical foundation for the proposed framework, the validation of which through actual field trials is a scope for future work.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.53-62
• /
• 2022

The deployment of advanced structural health monitoring (SHM) systems in large-scale civil structures collects large amounts of data. Note that these data may contain multiple types of anomalies (e.g., missing, minor, outlier, etc.) caused by harsh environment, sensor faults, transfer omission and other factors. These anomalies seriously affect the evaluation of structural performance. Therefore, the effective analysis and mining of SHM data is an extremely important task. Inspired by the deep learning paradigm, this study develops a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based data anomaly detection approach for SHM. The framework of the proposed approach includes three modules : (a) A three-channel input is established based on fast Fourier transform (FFT) and Gramian angular field (GAF) method; (b) A GANomaly is introduced and trained to extract features from normal samples alone for class-imbalanced problems; (c) Based on the output of GANomaly, a CNN is employed to distinguish the types of anomalies. In addition, a dataset-oriented method (i.e., multistage sampling) is adopted to obtain the optimal sampling ratios between all different samples. The proposed approach is tested with acceleration data from an SHM system of a long-span bridge. The results show that the proposed approach has a higher accuracy in detecting the multi-pattern anomalies of SHM data.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.6
• /
• pp.757-766
• /
• 2022

To train deep learning algorithms, a sufficient number of data are required. However, in most engineering systems, the acquisition of fault data is difficult or sometimes not feasible, while normal data are secured. The dearth of data is one of the major challenges to developing deep learning models, and fault diagnosis in particular cannot be made in the absence of fault data. With this context, this paper proposes an anomaly detection methodology for rotating machines using only normal data with self-labeling. Since only normal data are used for anomaly detection, a self-labeling method is used to generate a new labeled dataset. The overall procedure includes the following three steps: (1) transformation of normal data to self-labeled data based on a pretext task, (2) training the convolutional neural networks (CNN), and (3) anomaly detection using defined anomaly score based on the softmax output of the trained CNN. The softmax value of the abnormal sample shows different behavior from the normal softmax values. To verify the proposed method, four case studies were conducted, on the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing dataset, IEEE PHM 2012 data challenge dataset, PHMAP 2021 data challenge dataset, and laboratory bearing testbed; and the results were compared to those of existing machine learning and deep learning methods. The results showed that the proposed algorithm could detect faults in the bearing testbed and compressor with over 99.7% accuracy. In particular, it was possible to detect not only bearing faults but also structural faults such as unbalance and belt looseness with very high accuracy. Compared with the existing GAN, the autoencoder-based anomaly detection algorithm, the proposed method showed high anomaly detection performance.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.30 no.6
• /
• pp.661-671
• /
• 2022

Stayed cables are the key components for transmitting loads in cable-stayed bridges. Therefore, it is very important to evaluate the cable force condition to ensure bridge safety. An online condition assessment and anomaly localization method is proposed for cables based on the spatiotemporal correlation of grouped cable forces. First, an anomaly sensitive feature index is obtained based on the distribution characteristics of grouped cable forces. Second, an adaptive anomaly detection method based on the k-nearest neighbor rule is used to perform dissimilarity measurements on the extracted feature index, and such a method can effectively remove the interference of environment factors and vehicle loads on online condition assessment of the grouped cable forces. Furthermore, an online anomaly isolation and localization method for stay cables is established, and the complete decomposition contributions method is used to decompose the feature matrix of the grouped cable forces and build an anomaly isolation index. Finally, case studies were carried out to validate the proposed method using an in-service cable-stayed bridge equipped with a structural health monitoring system. The results show that the proposed approach is sensitive to the abnormal distribution of grouped cable forces and is robust to the influence of interference factors. In addition, the proposed approach can also localize the cables with abnormal cable forces online, which can be successfully applied to the field monitoring of cables for cable-stayed bridges.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.93-103
• /
• 2022

With the wider availability of sensor technology through easily affordable sensor devices, several Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems are deployed to monitor vital civil infrastructure. The continuous monitoring provides valuable information about the health of the structure that can help provide a decision support system for retrofits and other structural modifications. However, when the sensors are exposed to harsh environmental conditions, the data measured by the SHM systems tend to be affected by multiple anomalies caused by faulty or broken sensors. Given a deluge of high-dimensional data collected continuously over time, research into using machine learning methods to detect anomalies are a topic of great interest to the SHM community. This paper contributes to this effort by proposing a relatively new time series representation named "Shapelet Transform" in combination with a Random Forest classifier to autonomously identify anomalies in SHM data. The shapelet transform is a unique time series representation based solely on the shape of the time series data. Considering the individual characteristics unique to every anomaly, the application of this transform yields a new shape-based feature representation that can be combined with any standard machine learning algorithm to detect anomalous data with no manual intervention. For the present study, the anomaly detection framework consists of three steps: identifying unique shapes from anomalous data, using these shapes to transform the SHM data into a local-shape space and training machine learning algorithms on this transformed data to identify anomalies. The efficacy of this method is demonstrated by the identification of anomalies in acceleration data from an SHM system installed on a long-span bridge in China. The results show that multiple data anomalies in SHM data can be automatically detected with high accuracy using the proposed method.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.77-91
• /
• 2022

Various monitoring systems have been implemented in civil infrastructure to ensure structural safety and integrity. In long-term monitoring, these systems generate a large amount of data, where anomalies are not unusual and can pose unique challenges for structural health monitoring applications, such as system identification and damage detection. Therefore, developing efficient techniques is quite essential to recognize the anomalies in monitoring data. In this study, several machine learning techniques are explored and implemented to detect and classify various types of data anomalies. A field dataset, which consists of one month long acceleration data obtained from a long-span cable-stayed bridge in China, is employed to examine the machine learning techniques for automated data anomaly detection. These techniques include the statistic-based pattern recognition network, spectrogram-based convolutional neural network, image-based time history convolutional neural network, image-based time-frequency hybrid convolution neural network (GoogLeNet), and proposed ensemble neural network model. The ensemble model deliberately combines different machine learning models to enhance anomaly classification performance. The results show that all these techniques can successfully detect and classify six types of data anomalies (i.e., missing, minor, outlier, square, trend, drift). Moreover, both image-based time history convolutional neural network and GoogLeNet are further investigated for the capability of autonomous online anomaly classification and found to effectively classify anomalies with decent performance. As seen in comparison with accuracy, the proposed ensemble neural network model outperforms the other three machine learning techniques. This study also evaluates the proposed ensemble neural network model to a blind test dataset. As found in the results, this ensemble model is effective for data anomaly detection and applicable for the signal characteristics changing over time.