The Application of Bees Algorithm in Finite Element Model Updating

This research work is aimed to investigate the application of bees algorithm (BA) to the finite element (FE) model updating. BA is an evolutionary optimization algorithm that imitates the natural foraging behavior of the honeybees to find the global optimum of an objective function. Here, the weighted squared sum of the error between the measured modal parameters and the FE model predictions is considered as the objective function. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, BA is applied on a piping system to update several physical parameters of its FE model. The results obtained from the numerical model are compared with the experimental ones obtained through the modal testing. The results show that BA successfully updates the FE model. Moreover, the performance of this approach is compared with two popular optimization methods; the genetic algorithm (GA) and the particle swarm optimization (PSO). The comparison shows the advantage of BA over GA and its similarity to PSO in terms of accuracy in the presented case study. However, BA reaches to the optimum solution faster than PSO and GA. Therefore, it can be concluded that BA is a robust and accurate optimization method that could be a good candidate for the FE model updating.