Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is an effective approach to solve structural local damage detection. The damage detection in a double-beam system coupled via a set of springs based on a modified artificial bee colony algorithm is discussed. By using the system natural frequencies and modal assurance criteria (MAC)

the ABC algorithm is utilized to solve the nonlinear objective function from the coupled double-beam system. To avoid the algorithm trapped local optimize easily

the ABC algorithm is modified by choosing the tournament selection instead of roulette

and chaotic search mechanism is applied to improve algorithm's global search capability. The simulation results shows that the modified ABC algorithm can identify the local damage of the coupled system effective even under measurement noise，better than the original algorithm.