A Generic Fuzzy Metric for Damage Recognition in Structural Health Monitoring Systems

All engineered systems will deteriorate over time due to disturbing factors such as environment, increasingly surpassing (or closely surpassing) its design capacity, subsystem (subcomponent) degradation etc. We introduce an approach for assessing and recognizing potential damage of systems by using a generic metric with fuzzy sets. We propose transforming sparse data in a Bayesian updating scheme into fuzzy sets to be used in a similarity metric to identify the health or damage state. Two case studies using different damage features are used as exemplary applications for the proposed approach.