Damage-sensitive features such as natural frequencies are widely used for structural health monitoring; however, they are also influenced by the environmental condition. To address the environmental effect, principal component analysis is widely used. Before performing principal component analysis, the training data should be defined for the normal condition (baseline model) under environmental variability. It is worth noting that the natural change of the normal condition may exist due to an intrinsic behavior of the structural system. Without accounting for the natural change of the normal condition, numerous false alarms occur. However, the natural change of the normal condition cannot be known in advance. Although the description of the normal condition has a significant influence on the monitoring performance, it has received much less attention. To capture the natural change of the normal condition and detect the damage simultaneously, an adaptive statistical process monitoring using online learning algorithm is proposed for output-only structural health monitoring. The novelty aspect of the proposed method is the adaptive learning capability by moving the window of the recent samples (from normal condition) to update the baseline model. In this way, the baseline model can reflect the natural change of the normal condition in environmental variability. To handle both change rate of the normal condition and non-linear dependency of the damage-sensitive features, a variable moving window strategy is also proposed. The variable moving window strategy is the block-wise linearization method using k-means clustering based on Linde–Buzo–Gray algorithm and Bayesian information criterion. The proposed method and two existing methods (static linear principal component analysis and incremental linear principal component analysis) were applied to a full-scale bridge structure, which was artificially damaged at the end of the long-term monitoring. Among the three methods, the proposed method is the only successful method to deal with the non-linear dependency among features and detect the structural damage timely.

Condition assessments of structures require prediction models such as empirical model and numerical simulation model. Generally, these prediction models have model parameters to be estimated from experimental data. Bayesian inference is the formal statistical framework to estimate the model parameters and their uncertainties. As a result, uncertainties associated with the model and measurement can be accounted for decision making. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have been widely employed. However, there still remain some implementation issues from the inappropriate selection of the proposal mechanism in Markov chain. Since the posterior density for a given problem is often problem-dependent and unknown, users require a trial-and-error approach to select and tune optimal proposal mechanism. To relieve this difficulty, various adaptive MCMC algorithms have been recently appeared. Users must understand their mechanism and limitations before applying the algorithms to their problems. However, there is no comprehensive work to provide detailed exposition and their performance comparison together. This study aims to bring together different adaptive MCMC algorithms with the goal of providing their mechanisms and evaluating their performances through comparative study. Three algorithms are chosen as the representative proposal mechanism. From comparative studies, the discussions were drawn in terms of performances, simplicity and computational costs for less-experienced users.