Autoencoders for unsupervised real-time bridge health assessment

Over the last decades, the rising number of aging infrastructures has progressively fueled much interest toward the field of structural health monitoring. Following the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence algorithms, an autoencoder-based damage detection technique within the context of unsupervised learning is proposed in this paper to provide support for practical engineering applications. The developed methodology uses the autoencoder to reconstruct raw acceleration sequences of user-defined length collected from a healthy structure. To quantify the errors between the original input and the reconstructed output, which may be representative of damage occurrence, two indexes of reconstruction loss are selected as damage-sensitive features. To support damage detection, a selected number of short-time sequences are finally grouped into a unique macrosequence. The novel procedure can effectively both work at the single sensor level, as well as combine the predictive models using an ensemble learning strategy. Avoiding system identification, results obtained in the Z24 bridge demonstrate that the proposed method is quite effective for local damage detection with limited computational effort and using a limited number of sensors, thereby suitable to be easily applicable in the context of real-time bridge assessment.