This is another one on the use of finite element models along with machine learning algorithms for damage identification in bridges.
The success of detecting damage robustly relies on the availability of long periods of past data covering multiple weather scenarios and on the information contained in the data used during the learning process. Thus, the innovation of this paper is to apply a hybrid data set to train a Gaussian process regression, assuming a practically plausible range of environmental conditions. The proposed model presents a satisfactory performance to detect damage when structural changes caused by damage are blurred with changes caused by temperature.