Damage Localization and Severity Assessment of a Cable-Stayed Bridge Using a Message Passing Neural Network

Cable-stayed bridges are damaged by multiple factors such as natural disasters, weather, and vehicle load. In particular, if the stayed cable, which is an essential and weak component of the cable-stayed bridge, is damaged, it may adversely affect the adjacent cables and worsen the bridge structure condition. Therefore, we must accurately determine the condition of the cable with a technology-based evaluation strategy. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model that allows us to locate the damaged cable and estimate its cross-sectional area. To obtain the data required for the deep learning training, we use the tension data of the reduced area cable, which are simulated in the Practical Advanced Analysis Program (PAAP), a robust structural analysis program. We represent the sensor data of the damaged cable-stayed bridge as a graph composed of vertices and edges using tension and spatial information of the sensors. We apply the sensor geometry by mapping the tension data to the graph vertices and the connection relationship between sensors to the graph edges. We employ a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to use the graph representation of the sensor data directly. GNN, which has been actively studied recently, can treat graph-structured data with the most advanced performance. We train the GNN framework, the Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN), to perform two tasks to identify damaged cables and estimate the cable areas. We adopt a multi-task learning method for more efficient optimization. We show that the proposed technique achieves high performance with the cable-stayed bridge data generated from PAAP.