On The Use of Risk Measures in Digital Twins to Identify Weaknesses in Structures

Abstract: Given measurements from sensors and a set of standard forces, an optimization based approach to identify weakness in structures is introduced. The key novelty lies in letting the load and measurements to be random variables. Subsequently the conditional-value-at-risk (CVaR) is minimized subject to the elasticity equations as constraints. CVaR is a risk measure that leads to minimization of rare and low probability events which the standard expectation cannot. The optimization variable is the (deterministic) strength factor which appears as a coefficient in the elasticity equation, thus making the problem nonconvex. Due to uncertainty, the problem is high dimensional and, due to CVaR, the problem is nonsmooth. An adjoint based approach is developed with quadrature in the random variables. Numerical results are presented in the context of a plate, a large structure with trusses similar to those used in solar arrays or cranes, and a footbridge.