An improved procedure for updating finite element model based on an interactive multiobjective programming

• A model updating procedure based on an interactive multiobjective optimization technique (called STOM) is developed.
• The structural defects of the weighting method in conventional model updating are avoided.
• The aspiration levels of the updated model are utilized explicitly to yield a closed Pareto solution.
• The suggested model updating procedure is successfully applied to a real engineering problem as well as a simulation problem.

Finite element model updating is an optimization problem to identify and correct uncertain modeling parameters. In conventional model updating, physically incompatible criteria, which designate differences between analytical and experimental results, are combined into a single-objective function using weighting factors. There are no general rules for selecting the weighting factors since they are not directly related to the dynamic behavior of the updated model. Thus, a necessary approach is to solve the time-consuming optimization problem repeatedly by varying the values of weighting factors until a satisfactory solution is obtained. In this work, an interactive multiobjective optimization technique called satisficing trade-off method is introduced to avoid the difficulty. It is relatively easy to state what kind of solutions is satisfactory considering the correlations of the initial FE model with the experimental results, the importance of individual modal properties, and measurement errors, etc. The satisficing trade-off method uses this information directly in the optimization process and finds a Pareto solution which is nearest to the given information. Moreover, as the method provides the tangent hyperplane which approximates the Pareto surface in the neighborhood of the obtained Pareto solution, the desired updated model can be found in a few iterations.