Synthetic Data Generation for the Prototyping of Bridge Damage Detection Algorithms

Abstract

The application of Machine Learning (ML) to bridge Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is constrained by a lack of diverse and labelled datasets. Obtaining high-quality training data from operational infrastructure is inherently difficult because critical assets are typically repaired immediately upon the detection of defects, preventing the collection of data describing diverse failure modes. To address this scarcity and enable the prototyping of robust algorithms, this study presents a framework for generating synthetic modal frequencies using a calibrated Finite Element (FE) model of the S101 bridge. Aleatory uncertainties and environmental variability are incorporated through the stochastic variation of material properties and thermal loads derived from a 20-year climate record. Analysis of the generated dataset revealed that simulated thermal loads induced frequency shifts that often exceeded those caused by minor structural damage, confirming the necessity of training on environmentally representative data. The primary contribution of this work is an open-access, FAIR-compliant (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) synthetic dataset, intended to serve as a standardised benchmark for the SHM research community under conditions of combined structural and environmental uncertainty. To demonstrate the utility of the generated data, the performance of a supervised multi-layer perceptron and an unsupervised k-means clustering algorithm are evaluated, with the supervised approach achieving a maximum classification accuracy of 1.00. However, the framework also reveals a fundamental modelling limitation: the linear FE approach failed to replicate the physical response under pier settlement, producing frequency shifts an order of magnitude below those observed experimentally.