Over recent decades,the artificial neural networks(ANNs)have been applied as an effective approach for detecting damage in construction materials.However,to achieve a superior result of defect identification,they have to overcome some shortcomings,for instance slow convergence or stagnancy in local minima.Therefore,optimization algorithms with a global search ability are used to enhance ANNs,i.e.to increase the rate of convergence and to reach a global minimum.This paper introduces a two-stage approach for failure identification in a steel beam.In the first step,the presence of defects and their posi-tions are identified by modal indices.In the second step,a feedforward neural network,improved by a hybrid particle swarm optimization and gravitational search algorithm,namely FNN-PSOGSA,is used to quantify the severity of damage.Finite element(FE)models of the beam for two damage scenarios are used to certify the accuracy and reliability of the proposed method.For comparison,a traditional ANN is also used to estimate the severity of the damage.The obtained results prove that the proposed approach can be used effectively for damage detection and quantification.