Crested Porcupine Optimizer-Optimized CNN-BiLSTM-Attention Model for Predicting Main Girder Temperature in Bridges

Stage-built long-span bridges deform with temperature, affecting alignment to design needs. In this paper, a model for predicting temperature time series is proposed, which can predict temperatures in engineering practice and utilize the predicted results to adjust the elevation of stage construction. The model employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for initial feature extraction, followed by bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layers to capture temporal dependencies. An attention mechanism is applied to the LSTM output, enhancing the model’s ability to focus on the most relevant parts of the sequence. The Crested Porcupine Optimizer (CPO) is used to fine-tune parameters like the number of LSTM units, dropout rate, and learning rate. The experiments on the measured temperature data of an under-construction cable-stayed bridge are conducted to validate our model. The results indicate that our model outperforms the other five models in comparison, with all the R2 values exceeding 0.97. The average of the mean absolute error (MAE) on the 30 measure points is 0.19095, and the average of the root mean square error (RMSE) is 0.28283. Furthermore, the model’s low sensitivity to data makes it adaptable and effective for predicting temperatures and adjusting the elevation in large-span bridge construction.