EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION

OF STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS IN EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING

Anastasia Athanasiou

, Matteo De Felice

, Giuseppe Oliveto

and Pietro S. Oliveto

Institute of Structural Engineering, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

Energy and Environment Modeling Technical Unit, ENEA, Rome, Italy

School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K.

Keywords:

Earthquake engineering, Structural system identiﬁcation, Evolution strategies, CMA-ES, Real-world applica-

tions.

Abstract:

An application of Evolution Strategies (ESs) to the structural identiﬁcation of base isolation systems in earth-

quake engineering is presented. The analysis of a test problem considered in the literature clearly shows the

effectiveness of ESs for the problem. Simple ESs outperform the previously used methods while state-of-the-

art ones, such as the CMA-ES, provide practically exact solutions. The application of the CMA-ES to the real

data recorded in 2004, when releasing imposed displacements on a building in Solarino, leads to improved

identiﬁcation results and gives hints of limitations in the model available in literature. Improved models of

higher dimensionality are introduced to overcome such limitations. The application of the CMA-ES with the

new models leads to improvements of up to 53% compared to the previous solutions in literature. Thus, ESs

are shown to be a very powerful tool for the dynamic identiﬁcation of structural systems and an important aid

in the design and evaluation of models of high dimensionality for structure identiﬁcation.

1 INTRODUCTION

Structural engineering is a special technological ﬁeld

dealing with the analysis and design of engineer-

ing structures that must resist internal and/or external

loads. Such structures may be integral parts of build-

ings, bridges, dams, ship hulls, aircraft, engines and

so on. The design of such structures is an optimisa-

tion process by which the resistance capacity of the

system is made to meet the demands posed to it by

the environment. This process is based on the satis-

faction of the basic design inequality by which the ca-

pacity must be no lower than the demand. While the

capacity can be established by the engineer at each

step of the design process, the demand depends both

on the characteristics of the system itself and on its

interaction with the surrounding environment.

The evaluation of the demands requires the sim-

ulation of the behaviour of the structural system (i.e.

the response) under service and/or extreme loading

conditions (eg. earthquakes, tornadoes, turbulence

etc). Such simulations require the construction of me-

chanical models which enable the prediction of the

system’s behaviour. Usually a mechanical model is

described by a system of linear or non-linear differen-

tial equations and a set of physical parameters. While

the system of differential equations is derived from

ﬁrst principles in mechanics, the physical parameters

are derived from laboratory tests on materials and/or

on structural parts of the system.

Structural identiﬁcation can serve the dual pur-

pose of establishing whether a given model is suitable

to describe the behaviour of a structural system or to

verify that the physical parameters fed into a reliable

model correspond to the characteristics of the actual

materials used in the construction of the system.

Base isolation is a modern system for the pro-

tection of buildings and other constructions against

earthquake excitations and works on the principle of

decoupling the motion of the ground from that of the

building. Ideally the building should stay still while

the ground moves beneath it. This is achieved by in-

terposing a set of special bearings (i.e. seismic isola-

tors) between the foundation and the superstructure.

Given the low stiffness of the building structure

due to the presence of the seismic isolators it is rather

easy to displace (i.e. move) the building by pushing

it at the base with suitable actuators (i.e. hydraulic

jacks). This system has been used in a handful of

applications around the world (see the literature re-

Athanasiou A., De Felice M., Oliveto G. and S. Oliveto P..

EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS IN EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING.

DOI: 10.5220/0003672900520062

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications (ECTA-2011), pages 52-62

ISBN: 978-989-8425-83-6

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

view in (Oliveto et al., 2010) and references (15–19)

therein) including one in the town of Solarino in East-

ern Sicily (Oliveto et al., 2010).

The Solarino building was tested by release of im-

posed displacements in July 2004 and accelerations

were recorded at each ﬂoor. These recordings were

used as response functions for the identiﬁcation of the

base isolation system (Oliveto et al., 2010).

An iterative procedure based on the least squares

method was used in (Oliveto et al., 2010) for the iden-

tiﬁcation. This required tedious calculations of gradi-

ents which were done approximately by means of an

ingenious numerical procedure. Before applying the

identiﬁcation procedure to the experimental data, the

same procedure was evaluated against a test problem

for which the solution was known. Hence, the abil-

ity of the optimisation algorithm was assessed in the

absence of measurement noise and with the guarantee

that the function to be identiﬁed ﬁts the model. The

procedure, was then applied to the real data derived

from the tests on the Solarino building.

Although, the authors of (Oliveto et al., 2010) are

satisﬁed with their results, they conclude that a “need

for improvement both in the models and testing pro-

cedures also emerges from the numerical applications

and results obtained”. In particular, ﬁnding the “best”

algorithm for the identiﬁcation of such a kind of prob-

lem would provide an improvement on the state-of-

the-art on the identiﬁcation of building and structures

from dynamic tests.

In this paper the described problem is addressed

by applying Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for the

identiﬁcation of structural engineering systems. In-

deed, the ﬁrst applications of evolution computa-

tions were directed towards parameter optimisation

for civil engineering simulation models e.g. simu-

lating stress and displacement patterns of structures

under load (Schwefel, 1993).

Firstly, the performance of well known evolution-

ary algorithms for numerical optimization (i.e. Evo-

lution Strategies (ESs)) is evaluated on the same test

problem considered in (Oliveto et al., 2010). Several

ESs are applied and their performance is compared

amongst themselves and against the previous results

obtained in (Olivetoet al., 2010). It isshown that even

simple ESs outperform the previously used methods,

while state-of-the-art ones such as the CMA-ES, pro-

vide solutions improved by several orders of magni-

tude, practically the exact solution.

By applying efﬁcient ESs to the real data from

the Solarino experiments, further and convincing evi-

dence is given of the limitations of the model for the

identiﬁcation of the base isolation system. Such lim-

itations could not be as visible from the results ob-

tained with the previously used optimisation meth-

ods. Finally, new improved models designed to over-

come the limitations exhibited by the previous ones

are tested. It is stressed that application simplicity

and performance reliability of ESs allowed to eval-

uate improved models of higher dimensionality in a

much smaller amount of time than otherwise would

have been required.

The paper is structured as follows. The system

identiﬁcation problem is described in Section 2 where

previous results are presented together with a brief in-

troduction of ESs. A comparative study is performed

on the test problem in Section 3. The best performing

ESs are applied in Section 4 to data from experimen-

tal tests on the Solarino building. Two new models

for the identiﬁcation of hybrid base-isolation systems

are presented in Section 5 together with the results ob-

tained from the identiﬁcation of the Solarino building.

In the ﬁnal section conclusions are drawn.

2 PRELIMINARIES

2.1 The Mechanical Model

The mechanical model simulating the experiments

performed on the Solarino building is provided by the

one degree of freedom system shown in Fig. 1. The

justiﬁcation for its use can be found in (Oliveto et al.,

2010). The mechanical model consists of a mass re-

strained by a bi-linear spring (BS) in parallel with a

linear damper (LD) and a friction device (FD). Fig.

1 (a) describes the mechanical system, while Fig. 1

(b) shows the constitutive behaviour of the bi-linear

spring (modelling rubber bearings). Fig. 1 (c) shows

the relationship between the force in the friction de-

vice and the corresponding displacement (modelling

sliding bearings).

The mechanical model is governed by the follow-

ing second order ordinary differential equation

m· ¨u+ c · ˙u+ f

(u, ˙u) + f

·sign( ˙u) = 0 (1)

where c is the constant of the linear damper (LD),

is the dynamic friction force in the friction device

while ˙u and ¨u are respectively the ﬁrst and the sec-

ond derivatives of the displacement u(t) with respect

to time. Physically, the derivatives represent the ve-

locity (˙u) and the acceleration (¨u) of the mass m of

the building. Finally, the restoring force in the bi-

linear spring f

(u, ˙u) depends on the various phases

of motion of the mechanical model, that is the various

branches shown in Fig. 1 (b):

(u, ˙u) = k

·[u−u

−u

·sign( ˙u)] + k

·[u

+ u

·sign( ˙u)]

EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS IN EARTHQUAKE

ENGINEERING

Figure 1: The mechanical model: (a) mechanical system: (b) constitutive behaviour of the bi-linear spring; (c) friction force-

displacement relationship.

for the branches of slope k

and

(u, ˙u) = k

·u

·sign( ˙u) + k

·[u −u

·sign( ˙u)]

for the branches of slope k

. In the above equations u

is the displacement at the beginning of the considered

phase of motion while u

is the yield displacement of

the bi-linear spring as shown in Fig. 1 (b). The equa-

tion of motion (1), is supplemented by the following

two initial conditions which are implicit to the con-

sidered experiment:

u(t

) = u

˙u(t

) = 0

and u

is the imposed displacement.

The stated problem is highly non-linear but due

to the very simple excitation it nevertheless admits an

analytical solution (refer to (Oliveto et al., 2010) for

the solution). The existence of the analytical solu-

tion is convenient but by no means essential because

the equation of motion could be solved numerically at

the expense of additional computational costs and of

some loss in precision.

The parameters that deﬁne the mechanical model

are shown in Fig. 1, and for convenience are listed in

the following vector: (m,c,k

, f

). They repre-

sent the basic physical properties that must be iden-

tiﬁed. However, in view of the form given to the so-

lution in (Oliveto et al., 2010), a new set of parame-

ters is deﬁned as follows: (ω

,ω

,ζ

). This is

related to the previous one by the following relation-

ships:

, ω

, u

, ζ

2mω

From Eq. (1) it can be inferred that three related

response functions could be used for identiﬁcation

purposes: the displacement u(t), the velocity ˙u(t),

and the acceleration ¨u(t). For the application at hand,

the acceleration is the function that can be measured

most easily and therefore is the one that will be used.

As already mentioned an initial displacement u

is imposed in the dynamical tests. Since the measure-

ment of u

can be difﬁcult it may be considered as an

0 1 2 3 4 5

−0.8

−0.6

−0.4

−0.2

0.2

0.4

0.6

Time (s)

Acceleration (m/s

)

Figure 2: Acceleration functions corresponding to the sets

of system parameters shown in Table 1.

additional parameter that must be identiﬁed. There-

fore, the system parameter vector to be optimised is

the following one: S = (u

,ω

,ζ

)

Let A

be a vector of accelerations and t

be the

vector of the corresponding times. Furthermore, let A

be a vector of the same length as A

and t the vector

of the corresponding times representing a candidate

solution. Then, a measure of the distance between the

experimental data and the modelled ones is provided

by the following expression:

−A,A

−A)

)

−t,t

−t)

)

where (A,B) =

∑

i=1

·B

and N is the length of the

considered vectors.

2.2 Previous results

Before applying the iterative least squares method to

the experimental data, in (Oliveto et al., 2010) the

procedure was tested on a mathematically generated

dataset. In such a way, the optimal solution was

known beforehand and the measurement noise ex-

cluded. Two system parameter vectors were deﬁned

so that one could be used to generate a set of exper-

imental (analytical) data (i.e. S

), and the other to

deﬁne the starting point of the identiﬁcation process

ECTA 2011 - International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications

Table 1: First line: the two sets of system parameters considered in Fig. 2. S

is also the solution vector of the Test problem.

Second line: range of admissible values for the system parameters. Third line: performance of the identiﬁcation procedure

according to the number of branches considered.

System - u

(m) ω

(Hz) ω

(Hz) u

(m) u

(m) ζ

- 0.12 0.50 0.40 0.005 0.02 0.05

(opt) - 0.12 0.55 0.35 0.004 0.03 0.03

Lower Bound - 0.10 0.52 0.24 0.003 0.02 0.01

Upper Bound - 0.14 0.58 0.48 0.005 0.04 0.05

Branches Error

1 9.0981·10

−17

0.12 0.5500 0.3500 0.0040 0.0300 0.0300

1-2 9.4827·10

−10

0.12 0.5500 0.3500 0.0040 0.0300 0.0300

1-2-3 5.4252·10

−5

0.12 0.5503 0.3520 0.0038 0.0296 0.0338

1-2-3-4 2.4896·10

−4

0.12 0.5509 0.3534 0.0037 0.0294 0.0372

(i.e. S

). The two vectors are given in Table 1 and the

related acceleration series are shown in Fig. 2.

The observation of Fig. 2 shows two kinds of

discontinuities in the acceleration graphs, a function

discontinuity and a slope discontinuity. Between two

function discontinuities a continuous branch can be

identiﬁed. The two graphs show the same number

of branches; however, depending on the values of the

system parameter vector the number of branches can

be different.

Table 1 shows the results obtained in (Oliveto

et al., 2010) with the iterative least squares method for

the test problem. Better results are obtained by using

only one or two branches of the acceleration record

as may be seen from the error amplitude and by the

coincidence of the identiﬁed parameters with the as-

sumed ones. As the number of branches included in

the identiﬁcation procedure increases so does the er-

ror and the identiﬁed parameters are no longer coinci-

dent with the assumed ones.

The iterative least squares procedure described in

(Oliveto et al., 2010) is based on the numerical cal-

culation of the gradients of the test functions with re-

spect to the system parameters (refer to (Oliveto et al.,

2010), equations (29) – (35) for the actual procedure).

A suitable arc length is chosen in the trial system pa-

rameter vector space by appropriately modifying the

system of equations so that each component of the un-

known vector is dimensionless. In order to make the

procedure efﬁcient it is necessary to “manually” re-

duce the “arc length” as the procedure converges and

the error becomes smaller.

Although there certainly is no presence of noise

and the function to be identiﬁed does “ﬁt” the model,

the best found solution exhibits an error of the order of

−4

. The identiﬁed parameters differ from the given

ones already at the third decimal digit. This is far

from desired and excludes obtaining better results for

the real data recorded at Solarino for the presence of

noise and modelling errors.

A main problem in applying the least squares

method or any optimization method is the deﬁnition

of the starting point which in the case shown above

was the set of parameters in Table 1 corresponding to

the acceleration graph denoted by S

in Fig. 2. In

practice this problem can be overcome by providing

suitable lower and upper bounds to the sought param-

eters. This can be done by using physical insight on

the observation of the given acceleration record. The

bounds are shown in Table 1.

2.3 Evolution Strategies

The ﬁrst applications of ESs were directed towards

the parameter optimisation for civil engineering sim-

ulation models e.g. simulating stress and/or displace-

ment states of structures under load (Schwefel, 1993).

Obviously the performance of the ESs was compared

against their natural competitors i.e. the mathemati-

cal methods used for the purpose, especially those not

requiring the use of derivatives explicitly (Schwefel,

1993). Similarly, in the next section the performance

of ESs will be compared against the methods applied

in (Oliveto et al., 2010) on the same mathematically

generated dataset (i.e. the test problem). To this end,

ﬁrst it will be seen how very simple ESs perform on

the problem and then more complicated versions such

as the CMA-ES will be applied.

A general (µ

, λ)-ES maintains a parent popula-

tion of µ individuals, each consisting of a solution

vector and of a strategy vector. The solution vector

represents the candidate solution to the optimisation

problem. The strategy vector is a set of one or more

parameters that are used in combination with the so-

lution vector to create new candidate solutions.

In the considered problem an individual is rep-

resented as (x, s) where the solution vector x =

,... , x

) ∈ R

, is a real-valued vector for the

candidate solution of the system parameter vector S

introduced in Section 2. The initial µ solution vectors

are generated uniformly at random within the param-

eter bounds given in Table 1.

EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS IN EARTHQUAKE

ENGINEERING

Table 2: Average (Avg), Minimum (Min) and Median (Med) ﬁtness found by 100 algorithm runs. (a) (1+1)-ES with no

adaptation; (b) (1+1)-ES with no adaptation with normalised vectors; (c) (1+1)-ES with normalised vectors and rejecting

points with ﬁtness f = 1 as starting search point. The best results found are highlighted in bold.

(a) (α = 1) (b) (α = 1) (Norm) (c) (α = 1) (Norm) (f

6= 1)

σ Avg Min Med Avg Min Med Avg Min Med

−5

0.3455 5.03E-04 0.1257 0.4643 0.006 2.74E-01 0.28 5.60E-03 6.63E-02

−4

0.1108 5.23E-05 0.021 0.3218 7.80E-04 9.51E-02 0.1966 5.70E-03 5.73E-02

−3

0.0255 7.74E-05 0.0028 0.2553 2.76E-05 9.40E-03 0.012 1.44E-04 6.40E-03

−2

0.0475 4.85E-04 0.0093 0.0595 4.51E-06 1.48E-04 0.0025 8.89E-06 1.24E-04

0.025 0.2219 3.40E-03 0.00527 0.0114 2.17E-05 1.25E-04 1.56E-04 1.42E-05 1.33E-04

0.05 0.3778 6.10E-03 0.1403 0.0097 4.24E-05 1.86E-04 2.52E-04 4.04E-05 2.06E-04

0.1 0.342 1.00E-02 0.140 4.79E-04 7.77E-05 4.45E-04 4.55E-04 7.29E-05 4.19E-04

0.5 0.466 6.10E-03 0.278 0.0056 3.24E-04 5.10E-03 0.064 1.40E-03 6.00E-03

Figure 3: Fitness value versus number of evaluations of all the 100 runs (no adaptation and normalisation); (left) σ = 0.0001,

(centre) σ = 0.01 and (right) σ = 0.5. The median and the mean are in bold.

In each optimisation step an offspring population

of λ individuals is generated. Each individual is cre-

ated by ﬁrst selecting one of the µ individuals out of

the parent population uniformly at random, and then

by moving it in the search space of a quantity deter-

mined by applying its strategy vector s. The genera-

tion is completed by selecting the best µ individuals

out of the parent and of the offspring populations if

the plus selection strategy is used (i.e. (µ+λ)-EA) or

out of the offspring population if the comma selection

strategy is adopted (i.e. (µ,λ)-EA). The latter requires

that λ be greater than µ.

The way the strategy vector s is applied to gener-

ate new individualsis explained when describing each

ES considered in this paper. The main differences be-

tween various subclasses of ESs are in the size of the

strategy vector,on how it is used and on how its values

change during the optimisation process (i.e. adapta-

tion).

3 TEST PROBLEM STUDY

In this section a study of popular ESs for the test prob-

lem considered in (Oliveto et al., 2010) is performed.

Throughout the whole section (unless stated other-

wise) each algorithm is run 100 times allowing 1000

ﬁtness function evaluations in each run.

3.1 Experimental Setup: No Adaptation

The study begins by applying the simple (1+1)-ES

and using a strategy vector consisting of only one

strategy parameter σ (i.e. s ∈ R

). The solution

vector x of the parent individual (x ∈ R

, σ) is ini-

tialised uniformly at random in the bounded search

space. At each generation a new candidate solu-

tion is obtained by applying

x := x + z where z :=

σ(N

(0,1),. .. ,N

(0,1)) and N

(0,1) are indepen-

dent random samples from the standard normal dis-

tribution.

The only parameter of the algorithm is the stan-

dard deviation σ of the normal distribution used to

generate the offspring solution vector. The value of

σ does not change throughout the run of the algo-

rithm. Given the “tight” bounds on the feasible search

space provided in Section 2.2, the best ﬁxed σ-values

are expected to be small. By generating 100 random

search points a minimum ﬁtness (i.e. the error func-

tion value) of 0.0075 and an average ﬁtness of 0.3950

are obtained. These values help to understand how

well the algorithms are ﬁne-tuning the initial solution.

The algorithm is tested for standard deviations σ

distributed in the range [10

−6

,5 ·10

−2

]. The results

are shown in Table 2 (a). The best solutions which are

obtained for σ = 0.001 show average and minimum

ﬁtness of 0.0255 and of 7.74·10

−5

respectively.

Given the different value ranges for the bounds of

each parameter, the solution is normalised according

ECTA 2011 - International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications

Table 3: Effects of initial standard deviation σ

and 1/5 adaptation rule on Average (Avg), Minimum (Min) and Median (Med)

ﬁtness on 100 algorithm runs. (a) (1+1)-ES with 1/5 rule (α = 0.85 and G = 5); (b) (1+1)-ES with 1/5 rule (α = 0.95 and

G = 5); (c) (1+1)-ES with “local” 1/5-rule. New Best results are highlighted in bold.

(a) (α = 0.85) (b) (α = 0.95) (c) “local”-1/5

Avg Min Med Avg Min Med Avg Min Med

−4

0.0007 1.750E-06 1.52E-04 0.0029 2.21E-06 2.23E-04 3.15E-04 2.41E-06 2.20E-04

−3

1.36E-04 9.45E-07 1.02E-04 1.54E-04 1.19E-06 1.28E-04 3.47E-04 2.60E-06 1.87E-04

−2

0.0028 2.10E-07 8.87E-05 1.20E-04 2.08E-07 7.97E-05 0.0028 2.64E-06 1.72E-04

−1

0.0026 1.90E-07 8.06E-05 0.0047 1.00E-06 7.01E-05 0.0027 4.88E-06 2.04E-04

0.5 1.62E-04 2.56E-06 1.18E-04 1.25E-04 7.24E-07 8.00E-05 2.52E-04 3.62E-06 1.90E-04

1 1.57E-04 1.47E-06 1.16E-04 1.35E-04 1.07E-06 1.41E-04 0.0027 2.01E-06 1.74E-04

Figure 4: Performance of the three 1/5 success rule strategies, the isotropic (sSA) and the ellipsoidal (SA) on Sphere (left)

and on the test problem (right) when σ

= 0.01. Median values out of 100 runs are plotted.

to x

= (x−ℓ)/(u−ℓ) where x

is the normalised so-

lution and u, ℓ are the upper and lower bound vectors

on the solution space.

In Table 2 (b) the results for the (1+1)-ES using

the normalised values are shown. If σ is too small the

starting point does not get improved much whether

the solution is normalised or not. However, for large

enough σ values the normalised version outperforms

the default one.

Examination of Table 2 (a) and (b) reveals a large

difference between the average and the best solution.

This indicates that the quality of the ﬁnal solution may

depend considerably on the random starting point.

Fig. 3 shows the 100 runs for small, medium and large

σ values. From the graphs it can be noticed how hard

it is to escape from the penalty point (i.e. ﬁtness=1)

corresponding to a different number of branches be-

tween candidate and optimal solutions. A large σ is

needed in order to escape. Table 2 (c) shows the re-

sults when such a point is rejected as a starting search

point. If σ is not too small, the mean values are very

close to the median ones, as desired.

In the following sections adaptation techniques

are applied to removethe dependence of the results on

the initial value of the standard deviation and achieve

solutions of improved quality. For the rest of the pa-

per, all the experiments are performed with the nor-

malisation of the vector bounds and with rejection of

starting points with different number of branches.

3.2 1/5 Rule Adaptation

One of the ﬁrst methods proposed to control the mu-

tation rate in an ES was the 1/5-rule adaptation strat-

egy (Beyer and Schwefel, 2002). The idea is to tune

σ in a way that the success rate (i.e. the measured

ratio between the number of steps when the offspring

is retained and that when it is discarded) is about 1/5.

For the sphere function the 1/5-rule has been proved

to lead the (1+1)-ES to optimal mutation rates, hence

optimal performance (Beyer and Schwefel, 2002).

The strategy works as follows. After a given num-

ber of steps G, the mutation strength (i.e. the standard

deviation σ) is reduced by α if the rate of success-

ful mutations P

:= G

/G is less than 1/5. On the

other hand, if P

> 5, the mutation rate is increased by

α. Otherwise it remains unchanged. Recommended

values are G = N, if the dimensionality of the search

space N is sufﬁciently large, and 0.85 ≤ α < 1 (Beyer

and Schwefel, 2002).

The 1/5-rule strategy recently proposed by Kern

et al. (Kern et al., 2003) that allows to update the step

size after each generation rather than waiting until the

end of the “window phase“ G is also applied. In this

simpler implementation, at each generation the step

size is updated according to:

t+1

= σ



α if f(x

t+1

) ≤ f (x

)

(−1/4)

otherwise.

EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS IN EARTHQUAKE

ENGINEERING

Here α = 1/3 and the (−1/4) in the exponent corre-

sponds to the success rate of 1/5.

The same (1+1)-ES of the previous section with

the 1/5-rule adaptation schemes are run with stan-

dard parameters. Table 3 shows the results for a wide

range of initial standard deviations σ

. The algorithm

achieves mean ﬁtness values and best solutions of the

order of 10

−4

and 10

−7

respectively whatever the ini-

tial standard deviation σ

provided that it is not too

small. Also the median results are considerably im-

proved with values of the order of 10

−5

Fig. 4 shows the performance of the different 1/5-

rule algorithms considered on the Sphere function and

on the test function respectively. While on the Sphere,

the “local” 1/5 success rule is optimal, this does not

seem to be the case for the test problem at hand. The

larger “window” of G = 5 leads to a better adaptation

of the step size.

The step size adaptation is shown in Fig. 5 for

the test problem and the runs which provide median

results. It appears that the decrease of the step size in

the “local” 1/5 rule is too fast while it is too slow with

the “ellipsoidal” self adaptation technique introduced

and discussed in the next section.

3.3 Self-adaptation

Self-adaptation has been introduced as a mecha-

nism for the ES to automatically adjust the mutation

strength, by evolving not only the solution vector but

also the strategy parameters. The strategy vector is

also mutated such that standard deviations producing

ﬁtter solutions have higher probabilities of survival,

hence are evolved implicitly.

By still considering only one strategy parameter, a

mutation with self-adaptation of individual (x,σ) in-

volves ﬁrst generating a new σ-value and then apply-

ing it to the object vector x. This is done by setting

σ := σexp(τN (0,1)), z :=

σ(N

(0,1),. .. ,N

(0,1))

and ˜x := x+ z. Here τ = 1/

√

2N is generally rec-

ommended as standard deviation for

σ (Beyer and

Schwefel, 2002). By using only one strategy param-

eter σ, the mutation distribution is isotropic, i.e. sur-

faces of equal probability densities are hyper-spheres

(or circles for N = 2).

If N strategy parameters are used, individual step

sizes for each dimension are obtained leading to el-

lipsoidal surfaces of constant probability density as

the standard deviations evolve. With a strategy vec-

tor s := (σ

,... σ

) a new individual is generated by

setting:

s := exp(τ

(0,1))



exp(τN

(0,1),. .. ,σ

exp(τN

(0,1))



Figure 5: Step size evolution of the median ﬁtness run for

the three 1/5 success rule strategies, the isotropic (sSA) and

the ellipsoidal (SA) on the test problem when σ

= 0.01.

and z := (σ

(0,1),. .., σ

(0,1)). Recom-

mended values for the parameters are τ

= 1/

√

and τ = 1/

√

N, (Beyer and Schwefel, 2002).

The results for both strategies, isotropic (sSA) and

ellipsoidal (SA), are shown in Table 4, for the (1+10)-

ES. The results are very similar for other offspring

population sizes (from λ = 3 to λ = 20 were tested)

both with plus and comma selection strategies. Con-

cerning comma selection, bad average ﬁtness values

are achieved if the initial σ is too high (i.e. σ > 0.5)

even though a penalty proportional to the distance

from the bounds is applied for comma strategies.

Overall, comparable average performance to that

of the (1+1)-ES with the “local” 1/5-Rule is obtained

independently of the initial values of σ as long as they

are not too high or too low. Hence, not as much in-

dependence from the initial σ as with the 1/5-rule is

obtained. The typical evolution rate of σ is shown in

Fig. 5 where it is compared with that of the 1/5-rule.

No signiﬁcant improvementis achieved with the ellip-

soidal distributions with axes parallel to the reference

frame.

3.4 CMA-ES

Since the success of the described self-adaptation

technique relies on one-step improvements it is often

referred to as a local adaptation approach. By intro-

ducing correlations between the components of z the

ellipsoid may be arbitrarily rotated in the search space

and evolved to point in the direction of optimal solu-

tions. Another step towards more advanced parameter

adaptation techniques is to consider non-local infor-

mation gathered from more than one generation. Both

features are used by the (µ,λ)-CMA-ES considered in

this section.

The CMA-ES creates a multivariate normal distri-

bution N (m,C) determined by its mean vector m ∈

and its covariance matrix C ∈ R

NXN

. Instead of

keeping a population of µ individuals (as in the pre-

ECTA 2011 - International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications

Table 4: Results for the (1+10)-ESs.

Isotropic Mutations Ellipsoidal Mutations

Avg Min σ

Avg Min

−4

0.0032 1.54E-05 10

−4

0.0179 7.08E-05

−3

4.23E-04 7.59E-06 10

−3

0.0086 6.74E-05

−2

0.0031 2.91E-06 10

−2

0.0013 2.45E-05

0.05 3.17E-04 3.68E-06 0.05 9.38E-04 8.74E-06

0.1 3.02E-04 9.35E-06 0.1 69.25E-04 1.25E-05

1 0.0033 1.45E-05 1 0.0116 5.67E-05

Table 5: (a) Summary of best results found for the Test function with 1000 ﬁtness function evaluations; (b) 10000 ﬁtness

function evaluations.

ES adaptation (a) Avg Med Min (b) Avg Med Min

(1+1)-ES No (σ

= 0.01) 0.0595 1.48E-04 4.51E-06 1.02E-05 8.35E-06 8.47E-07

(1+1)-ES 1/5rule (α = 0.95, G = 5, σ

= 0.01) 1.20E-04 7.97E-05 2.08E-07 1.32E-08 2.36E-09 1.39E-12

(1+λ)-ES self ((1+5)-ES, σ

= 1) 0.0023 3.54E-04 2.30E-06 7.89E-05 5.69E-06 2.16E-08

CMA-ES non-loc. rot. ellips. self. 2.51E-05 5.79E-06 2.35E-10 2.22E-15 5.66E-16 2.14E-16

viously considered ESs), the covariance matrix C and

the mean vector m are evolved. At each step λ indi-

viduals are sampled from N (m,σ

C) and the best µ

are used to generate the new mean

m and covariance

matrix

C. For further details on the CMA-ES refer to

(Hansen and Ostermeier, 2001).

In the present experiments, all the algorithmic pa-

rameters are set as recommended in (Hansen and Os-

termeier, 2001) including λ = 4 + ⌊3lnN⌋ and µ =

λ/2. In the experiment set on the test problem as pre-

viously described the CMA-ES provided a set of so-

lutions with mean 2.51·10

−5

, median 5.79·10

−6

and

minimum 2.35 ·10

−10

thus outperforming other con-

sidered algorithms of an order of magnitude in mean

and median and of more than three orders of mag-

nitude concerning the minimum solutions. No im-

provements are obtained by increasing or diminishing

the population size (i.e. values from (1,4)-CMA-ES

through (3,6)-CMA-ES up to (8,16)-CMA-ES).

Finally, 100 runs of the best performing EAs each

of 10000 ﬁtness function evaluations were done. The

results are shown in Table 5(b). On this set of runs

the mean and best results scored by the CMA-ES are

−15

and 10

−17

respectively.

4 SOLARINO DATA

In July 2004, six free vibration tests under im-

posed displacement were performed on a four story

reinforced concrete building, seismically retroﬁtted

by base isolation. The nominal displacements var-

ied from a minimum of 4.06cm to a maximum of

13.29cm in the six dynamic tests. Unfortunately,

these may not be true displacements since they may

include residual displacement from tests performed

previously in the sequence. The main objective, is

the identiﬁcation of the properties of the isolation

system (i.e. the parameters of the previously de-

scribed model) and the initial displacement as dis-

cussed above using the recorded accelerations.

The results obtained in (Oliveto et al., 2010) using

an iterative least squares method are shown in Table

6. The procedure implied to start from a reasonable

guess for the system parameters (for the identiﬁcation

of the ﬁrst of the six tests), and use the ﬁrst branch

of the recorded acceleration for the identiﬁcation of

a new set of improved parameter values. This new

set of parameters was then used for the identiﬁcation

from the ﬁrst two branches and so on until ﬁve of the

branches were considered at once. The last branch

was derived from the governing equations using the

parameters identiﬁed from the previous segments of

the signal. For the identiﬁcation of the following tests

the result of the ﬁrst test was used as the initial guess

(i.e. the correct solution should be the same for all

tests excluding damage of the building caused by the

tests and/or effects due to environmental changes).

4.1 Previous Model

In this section advantage is taken of the simplicity of

ES application and the ESs that performed best on the

test problem are used. The parameter bounds to the

search space are shown in table 6.

While the CMA-ES once again outperforms the

other strategies, the difﬁculty of the identiﬁcation

problem is highlighted by the need to increase the

population size to a (18,36)-CMA-ES to obtain im-

proved results. Ten runs each are performed of (4,9),

(9,18) and (18,36) CMA-ES and of the three 1/5 rule

ESs allowing 100k ﬁtness evaluations in each run.

EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS IN EARTHQUAKE

ENGINEERING

Table 6: Identiﬁcation of the Solarino building base isolation system. Used lower and upper bounds of system parameters

are shown in lines starting with LB and UB repectively. The best identiﬁcation results obtained in the literature by the least

squares (LS) method from ﬁve tests are shown ﬁrst. The corresponding results obtained by the CMA-ES are shown next. The

number of times the best found solution was obtained in the runs is shown in brackets next to the test number. Quadratic

errors and improvement achieved by CMA-ES are shown in the last two columns.

Test u

(m) u

(m) ζ

(Hz) ω

(Hz) e

improvement

LB 0.0813 0.0018 0.0092 0 0.4832 0.2819 - -

UB 0.1333 0.0069 0.0366 0.1 0.5651 0.4417 - -

3 0.1108 0.0034 0.0181 4.5E-08 0.5235 0.3947 0.0234 -

5 0.1169 0.0034 0.0167 0.0127 0.5117 0.4070 0.0105 -

6 0.1228 0.0035 0.0179 3.6E-08 0.5269 0.3909 0.0129 -

7 0.0927 0.0033 0.0173 3.87E-08 0.5222 0.3964 0.0122 -

8 0.0965 0.0025 0.0118 0.0306 0.5402 0.4242 0.0055 -

3 (4) 0.1063 0.0026 0.0132 1E-10 0.5507 0.4014 0.0147 37%

5 (2) 0.1153 0.0025 0.0127 0.0153 0.5384 0.4108 0.0049 53%

6 (2) 0.1122 0.0027 0.0130 1E-10 0.5559 0.4036 0.0096 25%

7 (3) 0.0856 0.0030 0.0132 1E-10 0.5455 0.4130 0.0106 13%

8 (4) 0.0976 0.0026 0.0109 0.0307493278 0.5382 0.4235 0.0052 5%

Starting from parent population sizes of µ = 9 the

CMA-ES converges more than once to the same so-

lution.

Table 6 shows the best found solutions and the

number of times they were repeated. The other so-

lutions do not differ signiﬁcantly from the best ones

but for slightly larger errors and ﬁnal parameter digits.

Compared to the results from previous work, closer

bounds for the likely real values of the parameters are

now established.

The nominal values of the initial displacements,

in all likelyhood affected by measurement errors, are

given for each test in (Oliveto et al., 2010) together

with the identiﬁed ones. The estimated displacements

were always smaller than the nominal ones; here they

are found even smaller, except for test 8.

In three tests out of ﬁve damping (ζ

) is practi-

cally zero in line with what found in (Oliveto et al.,

2010), while in the remaining two ζ

is small but not

negligible and a little larger than in (Oliveto et al.,

2010). This presence of damping in tests 5 and 8

could point to an incapacity of the optimization proce-

dures to identify the absolute minimum, producing in-

stead local minima. Alternatively, data inconsistency

due to measurement noise and/or inadequate signal

treatment could be responsible for the discrepancy.

The remaining physical parameters show less dis-

persion in the identiﬁed values than before, with a co-

efﬁcient of variation nearly halved in each case. Ac-

tual values change from 0.13 to 0.07 for u

, from 0.16

to 0.08 for u

, from 0.02 to 0.01 for ω

and from

0.03 to 0.01 for ω

. The situation could improve even

further if the inconsistency highlighted by damping

could be solved.

From the results shown in Table 6 and as com-

Figure 6: Model 2 friction force-displacement relationship.

mented above, a considerable improvement in the

identiﬁcation procedure has been achieved by using

ES with the Solarino test data. In particular the results

are improvedup to 53% compared to those previously

available in literature. The performance discrepancy

of ES between the test problem and the real problem

seems to suggest that further improvements might be

required in the formulation of the mechanical model.

Some preliminary investigations in that direction are

pursued in the next section.

4.2 New Models

Two small changes to the described model are inves-

tigated herein. They affect only the description of the

friction damper of Fig.1 and will reﬂect in changes to

the diagram of Fig. 1(c). The changes stem from the

experimental observation that the friction force is not

constant during the motion. The diagram of Fig.5 as-

sumes that the friction force is constant within a half-

ECTA 2011 - International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications

Figure 7: Model 3 friction force-displacement relationship.

cycle of motion but it can change from one half-cycle

to the next. The considered change does not affect the

equations of the mechanical model as it only changes

one parameter value, but not the structure of the prob-

lem. However the dimension of the system parameter

vector is affected because an additional parameter is

required for each half-cycle of motion as compared to

the single one required earlier.

The considered model, for convenience denoted

model 2, provides results improved only slightly by

running the CMA-ES on it (i.e. quadratic error re-

duced from 0.0147 to 0.0145 on test 3). Contrary

to the previous model 1 the CMA-ES does not seem

to succeed to repeat results in more than one run on

model 2. This may be due to the greatly increased di-

mension of the problem (number of parameters nearly

doubled) and to having maintained the same number

of function evaluations (100k). The feeble success

with this model may be due to two factors; the ﬁrst

is the computational expensiveness due to the higher

dimension of the problem, the second is the insigniﬁ-

cant mechanical advantage because the friction force

changes more within a half-cycle than it does from

half-cycle to half-cycle. The latter aspect will be

clearer with the introduction of model 3.

An analytical solution for the mechanical model

shown in Fig.1 with the friction law sketched in Fig.6

has just been givenin (Athanasiou and Oliveto, 2011).

This third model helps to spread some light on the lit-

tle efﬁciency of model 2. While in model 3 the fric-

tion force varies linearly over a half-cycle, in model

2 the friction force is constant over the same half-

cycle. It can be expected therefore that model 3 can

ﬁne tune the friction force much better than model 2

and for that matter much better than model 1, where

the friction force is of constant amplitude. All this

is achieved at the expense of only one additional pa-

rameter, the slope k

in Fig.6. The application of the

(18,36)-CMA-ES with Model 3 to Test 3 converges

4 times out of 10 to a solution with quadratic error

= 0.0139 which is an extra improvement of more

than 5% on the ﬁnal ﬁtness.

5 CONCLUSIONS

A study of ESs for the identiﬁcation of base isolation

systems in buildings designed for earthquake action

has been presented. The results clearly show that ESs

are highly effective for the optimisation of the test

problem deﬁned in previous work for methodology

validation. All the considered ESs perform at least

as well as previous methods and the quality of so-

lutions improves with more sophisticated adaptation

strategies. The CMA-ES, considerably outperforms

previous algorithms of several orders of magnitude.

Having established the good performance of ESs

for the system identiﬁcation, the same ESs are applied

to the real data recorded on the Solarino building in

July 2004 with the model used previously in litera-

ture. Although the CMA-ES converges to more pre-

cise solutions, these do not allow the sought system

parameter values to be established with the highest

conﬁdence level. Two possible causes have been con-

sidered: the presence of noise in the recorded data

(i.e. the function to be optimised) and the model ade-

quacy to properly simulate the system response.

To investigatethe latter problem two new mechan-

ical models with higher number of parameters have

been developed. Both models, in conjunction with the

application of CMA-ES, enable to obtain improved

results. Model 3 allows ﬁne tuning friction damping

and provides a 5% improvement in the overall solu-

tion quality on Test 3.

Thus, in this paper ESs are shown to be a very

powerful tool for the dynamic identiﬁcation of struc-

tural systems. In particular, the CMA-ES combines

application simplicity with convergence reliability. In

view of the effectiveness shown in the applications

considered in the present work, the authors believe

that CMA-ES could be used advantageously with

more complex models and various excitation sources

including environmental ones. Presently improved

models are under development as a replacement of the

bi-linear description of rubber isolators.

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ECTA 2011 - International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications