This paper presents the application of particle swarm optimization algorithm to reconstruct the characteristics of impacts occurring on homogeneous and isotropic elastic plates and which cannot be reduced to a concentrated force. Solution of this inverse problem was achieved through minimizing a fitness function defined in terms of the root mean square error between the measured and the calculated responses. This included information provided by numerous sensors. The impacting force was assumed

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... to result from uniformly distributed pressure acting over a rectangular patch. Use was made of the reciprocity theorem to decouple the localization problem from the deconvolution part intended to reconstruct the pressure time signal. The particle swarm optimization based model was found to be highly efficient in finding the impact zone location. Focus was done on the robustness aspect of force impact localization when an additive white noise is assumed to perturb response measurements.