Identification of constitutive parameters for fractional viscoelasticity

•Proposing a model for parameters identification of fractional viscoelastic materials.•Identification results are not sensitive to noisy measurement responses.•Different space measurement points take no significant impact on results.•The ant number of ant colony optimization algorithm is as big as possible.

This paper develops a numerical model to identify constitutive parameters in the fractional viscoelastic field. An explicit semi-analytical numerical model and a finite difference (FD) method based numerical model are derived for solving the direct homogenous and regionally inhomogeneous fractional viscoelastic problems, respectively. A continuous ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is employed to solve the inverse problem of identification. The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated via the numerical verification of a two-dimensional identification problem formulated by the fractional Kelvin–Voigt model, and the noisy data and regional inhomogeneity etc. are taken into account.