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To reduce the runtime and ensure enough computation accuracy, this paper proposes a structural reliability assessment method by the use of sensitivity analysis (SA) and support vector machine (SVM). The sensitivity analysis is firstly applied to assess the effect of random variables on the values of performance function, while the small-influence variables are rejected as input vectors of SVM. Then, the trained SVM is used to classify the input vectors, which are produced by sampling the residual variables based on their distributions. Finally, the reliability assessment is implemented with the aid of reliability theory. A 10-bar planar truss is used to validate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method, and a performance comparison is made with other existing methods. The results show that the proposed method can largely save the runtime with less reduction of the accuracy; furthermore, the accuracy using the proposed method is the highest among the methods employed.

Optimization techniques have been applied to structural health monitoring and damage detection of civil infrastructures for two decades. The standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) is easy to fall into the local optimum and such deficiency also exists in the multiparticle swarm coevolution optimization (MPSCO). This paper presents an improved MPSCO algorithm (IMPSCO) firstly and then integrates it with Newmark’s algorithm to localize and quantify the structural damage by using the damage threshold proposed. To validate the proposed method, a numerical simulation and an experimental study of a seven-story steel frame were employed finally, and a comparison was made between the proposed method and the genetic algorithm (GA). The results show threefold: (1) the proposed method not only is capable of localization and quantification of damage, but also has good noise-tolerance; (2) the damage location can be accurately detected using the damage threshold proposed in this paper; and (3) compared with the GA, the IMPSCO algorithm is more efficient and accurate for damage detection problems in general. This implies that the proposed method is applicable and effective in the community of damage detection and structural health monitoring.