This article presents an effective method for structural damage identification. The damage diagnosis problem is introduced as an optimization problem which is based on computing static displacements by the flexibility matrix. By utilizing this matrix, the complexity of the static displacement measurements in real cases can be overcome. The optimization problem is solved by a fast evolutionary optimization strategy, named the cuckoo optimization algorithm. The performance of the presented method was demonstrated
by studying the benchmark problem provided by the IASC-ASCE Task Group on Structural Health Monitoring, and a numerical example of a frame. Moreover, the robustness of the presented approach was investigated in the presence of some prevalent modelling errors, and also when noisy and incomplete modal data are available. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed method was verified by an experimental study of a five-storey shear building structure. All the obtained results show the good performance of the presented method.