14/07/22 RSCollado Alejandro

Neural Network Approach for Analyzing Seismic Data to Identify Potentially Hazardous Bridges

Tienfuan Kerh, Chuhsiung Huang, David Gunaratnam

Mathematical problems in engineering, Volume 2011 ID464353

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The communications in Taiwan relies heavily on the pair of highways that crosses the island from bottom
to top. Mountains occupy a large percentage of the geography of the country, to the extent that 45% of the
kilometers of the high way are built on bridges. This characteristics and the location of Taiwan in the Ring
of Fire of the Pacific makes it especially important to have a proper assessment of the status of the bridges.
The bridges lack of any device to track the PGA that they suffer in each epoch, but a large network of
seismic stations along the way monitor the seismic activity of the island. To be able to specify the PGA
that each bridge suffers, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is built with the data gathered by the seismic
stations by studying the focal depth, the local magnitude and the epicenter distance.
After the training period, the correlation of the results predicted with the actual measures are around 0.9,
being >0.7 a strong correlation. Also, the root mean square error reaches values of 10 -4 for every station,
assuring that any result is likely to represent the actual behavior.
To obtain the PGA from any data input two approaches are studied. The first approach uses a rule of
mixtures by combining the PGA of the neighbor stations to obtain the bridges PGA. The second is directly
processed from the Neural Network by taking the distance from the epicenter to the bridge.

The two methods have a good agreement though the first one tends to take bigger values of PGA. With the
use of this framework 5 bridges out of 21 are identified as potentially in danger as the estimated PGA is
bigger than the one that the technical code specifies (Figure 6)

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are computational models inspired by the brain, which are capable of machine learning.
ANNs are generally presented as systems of interconnected nodes or "neurons" which can compute values from inputs (Fig.
1).
The working process of these systems is based on a trial-error-correction process that imitates the process of learning:

-In case of the human brain, after an unexpected input (i.e. we tumble and we are
about to fall) our brain automatically issues an output, if the result is unexpected
(i.e. we got hurt) the next time the brain will issue another output (i.e. use the
hands) until the outcome is acceptable. That way our reflexes are able to learn
to response.

Figure 1

-Since ANNs are a copy of our natural neural network, the same process is used,
they will learn by experience:
We are going to run a series of cases with the program so that it attains
experience and starts to learn about our problem. Actually the program is going
to make an elaborated relationship between input and output by varying weights
(wji) of the mathematical relationship (Fig.2) until the results obtained matches
the ones that are known.

v ij = ( W ij X i+ )
Figure 2
In this figure, X are the inputs of the problem and V the output obtained. The goal of this process is that with enough
learning, a neural network will be able to understand any problem and will be able to solve it with different data.
Example of Neural Networks in Structure Engineering
In one of my master subjects this problem was presented. A concrete structure was built, but in one section the concrete is
damaged, but it was not known how much or which part was affected. For the problem, a finite model element was made
(Fig.3) and the structure was divided in small sections

Figure 3
Then we obtained the modal response of the structure in a series of invented cases for the 5 first modes. In total, the learning
part consisted of 65 cases in which we varied the elastic module in a couple of ways.
The input of the program was the modal response and the output the elastic module of each division of the structure (each
beam divided in 3 sections, and central column in 2 sections).

Figure 4

After the ANN built with a free software (EasyNN) ran through the cases, the average error was 0.0057 and the maximum
error was 0.039. Then, the actual cases of damage were given, and only the modal behaviors were introduced. The difference
in the concrete elastic module by the neural network and the finite element program was the following (Fig. 5)

Figure 5
The main feature of the Neural Networks is that after the problem is studied, it can solve any case. This process is the one
that, for example, allows a live maintenance on important buildings, because from the variations of its vibration it can be
observed is some damaged has appeared and where.
Recently Matlab started to include an elaborated Artificial Neural Network code.