Differential evolution strategy for structural system identification

Differential evolution (DE) is a heuristic method that has yielded promising results for solving complex optimization problems. The potentialities of DE are its simple structure, easy use, convergence property, quality of solution, and robustness. This paper utilizes a DE strategy to parameters estimation of structural systems, which could be formulated as a multi-modal numerical optimization problem with high dimension. Simulation results for identifying the parameters of structural systems under conditions including limited output data, noise polluted signals, and no prior knowledge of mass, damping, or stiffness are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.