An approach based on improved glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) for structure damage detection is presented. The local damage is simulated by a reduction in the elemental Youngs modulus of the beam .In order to enhance accuracy and convergence rate

the perturbation of the glowworm without neighbor is offered and a new search strategy is introduced in the movement phase of GSO to avoid local optima and enhance the GSO algorithm in high dimensions space target function optimization question solution ability. On the other hand

Axial functionally graded (AFG) beam with the assumptions of Euler-Bernoulli beam theory is adopted to establish the dynamic equation. The numerical experiments with a simply supported beam is carried to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed improvement GSO. The result reveals that the proposed method is more accurate compared to the original GSO

leader GSO (LGSO)，and the variation step adaptive GSO.