This paper presents the identification of the impact force acting on a simply supported beam. The force identification is an inverse problem in which the measured response of the structure is used to determine the applied force. The identification problem is formulated as an optimization problem and the genetic algorithm is utilized to solve the optimization problem. The objective function is calculated on the difference between analytical and measured responses and the decision variables are

more »

... e location and magnitude of the applied force. The results from simulation show the effectiveness of the approach and its robustness vs. the measurement noise and sensor location.