Improved artificial bee colony algorithm for crack identification in beam using natural frequencies only

An improved artificial bee colony algorithm (I-ABC) is proposed for crack identification in beam structures. ABC is a heuristic algorithm and swarm technique with simple structure, which is easy to implement but with slow convergence rate. In the I-ABC, the differential evolution (DE) mechanism is introduced to employed bee phase, roulette selection strategy is replaced by tournament selection strategy and a new formula is used to simulate onlooker bee’s behaviour. A discrete open crack is used for vibration analysis of the cracked beam and only the changes in the first few natural frequencies are utilized to establish the objective function of the optimization problem for crack identification. A numerical simulation and an experimental work are studied to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Studies show that the present techniques can produce more accurate damage identification results when compared with original ABC, DE algorithm, particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm.