Summary A probabilistic method is presented for identifying the dynamic soil‐foundation stiffnesses of building structures. It is based on model updating of a Timoshenko beam resting on sway and rocking springs, which respectively represent the superstructure and the soil‐foundation system. Unlike those previously employed for this particular problem, the proposed method is a Bayesian one, which accounts for the prevailing uncertainties due to modeling and measurement errors. As such, it yields the probability distribution of the system parameters as opposed to average/deterministic values. In this approach, the joint probability density function of the parameters that control the flexible‐base Timoshenko beam model, together with the fundamental natural frequency and mode shape of the system, forms the prior distribution. Using Bayes' theorem, a posterior distribution is obtained by updating the prior distribution with a sparsely measured mode shape and frequency. The most probable realizations of the system parameters are then determined by maximizing the posterior distribution. For this purpose, first‐ and second‐order derivatives of the objective function are analytically computed via direct differentiation. The proposed method is verified using a synthetic example. Additionally, sensitivity analyses are carried out on both the system parameters and standard deviations of the sources of error. Subsequently, the proposed method is applied to real‐life data recorded at the Millikan Library building, which is located at the California Institute of Technology campus in Pasadena, California, and the results are compared with a previous deterministic study.

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This paper puts forward a novel methodology of employing inverse filtering technique to extract bridge features from acceleration signals recorded on passing vehicles using smartphones. Since the vibration of a vehicle moving on a bridge will be affected by various features related to the vehicle, such as suspension and speed, this study focuses on filtering out these effects to extract bridge frequencies. Hence, an inverse filter is designed by employing the spectrum of vibration data of the vehicle when moving off the bridge to form a filter that will remove the car-related frequency content. Later, when the same car is moving on the bridge, this filter is applied to the spectrum of recorded data to suppress the car-related frequencies and amplify the bridge-related frequencies. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is evaluated with experiments using a custom-built robot car as the vehicle moving over a lab-scale simply supported bridge. Nine combinations of speed and suspension stiffness of the car have been considered to investigate the robustness of the proposed methodology against car features. The results demonstrate that the inverse filtering method offers significant promise for identifying the fundamental frequency of the bridge. Since this approach considers each data source separately and designs a unique filter for each data collection device within each car, it is robust against device and car features.

Summary Advances in smart infrastructure produces a natural demand of system identification techniques for structural health and performance monitoring that can be scaled to regions and large asset inventories. Conventional approaches require sensors to be installed, often in long‐term deployments, on the monitored infrastructure systems, which is a costly undertaking when thousands of systems (e.g., bridges) need to be monitored. This paper presents a novel mode shape identification method for bridges that uses data collected from moving vehicles as input—a paradigm that can overcome limitations associated with conventional approaches. The method consists of two steps. First, the data collected from moving measurement points are mapped to virtual fixed points to generate a sparse matrix. Then, a “soft‐imputing” technique is employed to fill the sparse matrix. Finally, a singular value decomposition is applied to extract the mode shapes of the bridge. Experiments with synthetic, yet realistic, data are conducted to verify the method. The sensitivity of the proposed approach to different factors, including the number of vehicles, car speed, road roughness, and measurement errors, are also investigated. The results show that the proposed method is capable of identifying the mode shapes of the bridge accurately.