Ill-Posedness Determination of Moving Force Identification and Parameters Selection for Regularization Methods

Moving force identification (MFI) from dynamic responses of bridges is a typical inverse problem with ill-posedness. Under the efforts of researchers, some regularization methods have been presented to solve the ill-posed problem, but there still lacks an effective index to reveal the ill-posedness of the vehicle-bridge dynamic system such that it can be utilized as a guidance for the regularization parameter selection. In this paper, an ill-posedness indicator (IPI) defined as the ratio of the Fourier coefficient to the singular value is adopted to reveal the ill-posedness in the MFI problem. Simulation results show that the larger the IPI value is, the more obvious the ill-posedness of the vehicle-bridge system equation, namely, the intrinsic factor of ill-posedness in MFI is attributed to very large IPI value. The maximum IPI value increases with the increasing noise level, which leads directly to the ill-posedness of the vehicle-bridge system equation. In addition, a relative percentage error (RPE) is used to select the optimal regularization parameters, while evaluating the ill-posedness existing in the MFI. Using the proposed IPI value, the influence of ill-posedness on identified results is evaluated in this study, which can assist qualitatively and quantitatively in selecting optimal regularization parameters and proper regularization methods.