A comparative study on the subspace based system identification techniques applied on civil engineering structures

The Subspace based System Identification Techniques (SSIT) have been very popular within the research circles in the last decade due to their proven superiority over the other existing system identification techniques. For operational (output only) modal analysis, the stochastic SSIT and for operational modal analysis in the presence of exogenous inputs, the combined deterministic stochastic SSIT have been used in the literature. This study compares the application of the two alternative techniques on a typical school building in Istanbul using 100 Monte Carlo simulations. The study clearly shows that the combined deterministic stochastic SSIT performs superior to the stochastic SSIT when the techniques are applied on noisy data from low to mid rise stiff structures.