A robust method for pre-stress adjustment of cable-strut structures based on sparse regression

•The control system is designed based on the singular values of a sensitivity matrix.•The method to determine control strategy is robust to noise.•The pre-stress error is greatly reduced by adjusting a small number of members. The pre-stress errors caused by construction affect the structural performance of cable-strut structures. The pre-stress errors can be reduced by adjusting the lengths of the structural members. Previous studies did not consider the computational robustness and sparseness of adjusted elements. This paper proposes a robust approach for the pre-stress adjustment of cable-strut structures based on sparse regression. The sensitivity matrix relating the element elongations to the relative pre-stress variations is derived. The active and measured elements are selected based on the physical meaning of the singular values of the sensitivity matrix. Sparse regression is used to obtain the element elongations, and a modified orthogonal matching pursuit method is proposed to obtain the sparse solution. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using a typical numerical example. It shows that the proposed approach can significantly decrease the pre-stress errors by adjusting a small number of active elements and is robust to noise.