Abstract: The finite element model updating is advantageous in damage identification because it is physically meaningful and simultaneously identifies the damage location and extent. It provides a direct and important basis for structural safety assessment. We firstly present the background and basic process of model updating based damage identification, and summarize its development in the past thirty years. A finite element model of a civil structure is usually large in scale and contains many parameters to update. It makes the model updating process time consuming. Therefore, substructure-based model updating methods are developed to identify the damage of large-scale civil structures to improve the efficiency of the model updating process. The two methods are applied to the damage identification of a high-rise building model to illustrate their advantages in practical damage assessment. A civil structure is large in scale while the damage is localized. The substructuring method divides the global structure into several independent substructures for the analysis. The substructure-based damage identification is achieved by updating a few substructures, avoiding repeated analysis of the large whole structures, and therefore improving the accuracy and efficiency of the model updating process.