the optimal sensor placement process in steel structures using dabc algorithm

the optimal sensor placement (osp) is a critical issue in the structural health monitoring (shm) process. the goal of osp is to find the most appropriate sensor locations in a structural system. these sensor locations should give the most efficient structural dynamic information compared with the other possible locations. in this paper, the discrete artificial bee colony algorithm (dabc) is used to find a proper sensor layout for the structural system. a modal assurance criterion-oriented objective function is defined to investigate the sensor location efficiencies according to the mode shapes of the structural system. a population matrix with unequal elements is defined in the dabc algorithm to constrain the optimization procedure. the dabc algorithm is applied on 5-, 10-, and 15-storey three-bay steel moment resisting frames to find the most efficient sensor layout. the results indicate that dabc algorithm is a proper method to detect the optimal sensor placement in the shm process.