Discussions and Closures
occurs. In other words, it is absolutely necessary to gather data
Discussion of Novel Sensor
ClusteringBased Approach for
Simultaneous Detection of Stiffness
and Mass Changes Using Output-Only Data
by Qipei Mei and Mustafa Gl
DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)ST.1943-541X.0001218
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by KYOTO U KOGAKU CHIKYU on 10/01/15. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.
Izuru Takewaki, M.ASCE 1
1
Professor, Dept. of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, Kyoto
Univ., Nishikyo, Kyoto 615-8540, Japan. E-mail: takewaki@archi
.kyoto-u.ac.jp
The authors present an interesting method for simultaneous
detection of stiffness and mass changes of mass-spring systems.
This may be classified into a branch of system identification
and structural health monitoring (Housner et al. 1997; Takewaki
et al. 2011). This method employs a sensor clustering-based time
series approach for anomaly detection. The basic idea of this
approach comes from the hypothesis that localized change in
the properties of a structure may affect the relationship between
the accelerations around the position where the damage
occurs. They use an auto-regressive moving-average with exog-
enous input (ARMAX) model for time series data. The differences
of the ARMAX model coefficients are employed as damage
features to determine the existence, location, and severity of the
damage. They applied the proposed method to a four-degrees-
of-freedom mass-spring system and a shear building model. They
also present a brief review of the history of methods for structural
health monitoring and damage detection. It is desired that the
following issues be addressed appropriately.
First, many readers may wonder the realism of the proposed
method. It is well known that damage detection is intrinsically
difficult to be resolved in the realistic application to actual circum-
stances. In damage detection, it is inevitable to prepare the inves-
tigation on the corresponding healthy state. This treatment requires
a tremendous amount of effort in preparing data before damage
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram for damage detection in shear-bending model
ASCE
for the healthy state. Unless one knows the healthy state, it is
not possible to know whether the state after an event is healthy
or damaged. If restricted to a shear building model or a shear-
bending model, the recording at limited floors may be realistic
and possible (Kuwabara et al. 2013). This method is based on a
pioneering nonparametric approach (Udwadia et al. 1978). Fig. 1
shows a schematic diagram for the damage detection in shear-
bending models (Kuwabara et al. 2013). On the other hand, some
approaches using a lot of data and a great deal of repeated calcu-
lations have been proposed for shear buildings (Zhang and Johnson
2013a, b). These approaches should also be compared with other
competitive approaches (Takewaki and Nakamura 2000, 2005,
2010; Takewaki et al. 2011). Unfortunately, it appears that these
closely related works (Takewaki and Nakamura 2000, 2005,
2010; Takewaki et al. 2011; Kuwabara et al. 2013) were not
brought to the authors attention and were not referred in the
present paper. This fact also applies to other works (Zhang and
Johnson 2013a, b).
Secondly, the authors should compare their approach with other
approaches using auto-regressive with exogenous input (ARX)
models (Takewaki and Nakamura 2010; Takewaki et al. 2011;
Minami et al. 2013; Ikeda et al. 2014a). Especially the
method by Takewaki and Nakamura (2010) deals with time-
variant nonparametric identification of natural frequencies and
modal damping ratios using ARX models. The method has been
applied successfully to an actual base-isolated building (Takewaki
and Nakamura 2010) and has also been applied to high-rise
buildings in Osaka and Tokyo during the 2011 off the Pacific coast
of Tohoku earthquake (Minami et al. 2013; Ikeda et al. 2014a).
Thirdly, the proposed approach has been applied to numerical
simulation models with rather low noise level. The proposed
method may be intended to use for damage detection of earthquake
ground motions judging from the noise level. It seems the inves-
tigation on better clustering of sensors used in the present method is
not promising for application to actual situations under earthquake
ground motions. The applicability to ambient vibration data should
be investigated in the future (Ikeda et al. 2014b).
07015007-1 J. Struct. Eng.
J. Struct. Eng.
 The discusser would like the authors to place their interesting
and important paper in the appropriate history of structural health
monitoring and damage detection by referring to other related
works and reviews.
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