Abstract
High-precision operational flight loads are essential for monitoring fatigue of individual aircraft and are usually determined by flight parameters. To tackle the nonlinear relationship between flight loads and flight parameters for more accurate prediction of flight loads, artificial neural networks have been widely studied. However, there are still two major problems, namely the training strategy and sensitivity analysis of the flight parameters. For the first problem, the gradient descent method is usually used, which is time-consuming and can easily converge to a local solution. To solve this problem, an extreme learning machine is proposed to determine the weights based on a Moore–Penrose generalized inverse. Moreover, a genetic algorithm method is proposed to optimize the weights between the input and hidden layers. For the second problem, a mean impact value (MIV) method is proposed to measure the sensitivity of the flight parameters, and the neuron number in the hidden layer is also optimized. Finally, based on the measured dataset of an aircraft, the proposed flight load prediction method is verified to be effective and efficient. In addition, a comparison is made with some well-known neural networks to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.