Optimal sensor placement for cable force monitoring based on multioutput support vector regression model

Cable force monitoring is an essential and critical part of structural health monitoring for cable-supported bridges. The quality of obtained information depends considerably on the number and location of limited sensors. The purpose of this article is to provide a method for optimal sensor placement for cable force monitoring in cable-supported bridges. Based on the spatial correlation between neighbouring or symmetrical cable forces, the structural information of non-monitored cables can be predicted by multioutput support vector regression models, established between monitored (input) and the non-monitored (output) cable forces. The number and placement of cable force sensors have significant influence on prediction performance of established multioutput support vector regression models. The proposed optimal sensor configuration is to select multioutput support vector regression models with minimum prediction error from all possible sensor locations. In this study, information entropy is employed to measure the prediction performance of different sensor configurations and formulate the objective function, optimised by three computationally effective algorithms: forward sequential sensor placement algorithm, backward sequential sensor placement algorithm and genetic algorithm. The application of proposed method to Nanjing No. 3 Yangtze River Bridge confirmed the efficiency, accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method.