A new dam structural response estimation paradigm powered by deep learning and transfer learning techniques

With the rapid development of information and communication techniques, dam structural health assessment based on data collected from structural health monitoring systems has become a trend. This allows for applying data-driven methods for dam safety analysis. However, data-driven models in most related literature are statistical and shallow machine learning models, which cannot capture the time series patterns or learn from long-term dependencies of dam structural response time series. Furthermore, the effectiveness and applicability of these models are only validated in a small data set and part of monitoring points in a dam structural health monitoring system. To address the problems, this article proposes a new modeling paradigm based on various deep learning and transfer learning techniques. The paradigm utilizes one-dimensional convolutional neural networks to extract the inherent features from dam structural response–related environmental quantity monitoring data. Then bidirectional gated recurrent unit with a self-attention mechanism is used to learn from long-term dependencies, and transfer learning is utilized to transfer knowledge learned from the typical monitoring point to the others. The proposed paradigm integrates the powerful modeling capability of deep learning networks and the flexible transferability of transfer learning. Rather than traditional models that rely on experience for feature selection, the proposed deep learning–based paradigm directly utilizes environmental monitoring time series as inputs to accurately estimate dam structural response changes. A high arch dam in long-term service is selected as the case study, and three monitoring items, including dam displacement, crack opening displacement, and seepage are used as the research objects. The experimental results show that the proposed paradigm outperforms conventional and shallow machine learning–based methods in all 41 tested monitoring points, which indicates that the proposed paradigm is capable of dealing with dam structural response estimation with high accuracy and robustness.