Composite structures are extremely useful for aerospace, automotive, marine and civil applications due to their very high specific structural properties. These structures are subjected to severe dynamic loading in their service life. Repeated exposure to these severe loading conditions can induce structural damage which ultimately may precipitate a catastrophic failure. Therefore, an interest in the continuous inspection and maintenance of engineering structures has grown tremendously in recent years. Sensitive aerospace applications can have small design margins and any inadequacy in knowledge of the system may cause design failure. Structures made from composite materials posses complicated failure mechanism as compared to those made from conventional metallic materials. In composite structural design, it is hence very important to properly model geometric intricacies and various imperfections such as delaminations and cracks. Two important issues are addressed in this thesis: (1) structural modeling of nonlinear delamination and uncertainty propagation in nonlinear characteristics of composite plate structures and (2) development of a model based damage detection system to handle uncertainty issues. An earlier proposed shear deformable C0 composite plate finite element is modified to alleviate modeling uncertainty issues associated with a damage detection problem. Parabolic variation of transverse shear stresses across the plate thickness is incorporated into the modified formulation using mixed shear interpolation technique. Validity of the proposed modification is established through available literature. Correction of the transverse shear stress term in the formulation results in about 2 percent higher solution accuracy than the earlier model. It is found that the transverse shear effect increases with higher modes of the plate deformation. Transverse shear effects are more prominent in sandwich plates. This refined composite plate finite element is used for large deformation dynamic analysis of delaminated composite plates. The inter-laminar contact at the delaminated region in composite plates is modeled with the augmented Lagrangian approach. Numerical simulations are carried out to investigate the effect of delamination on the nonlinear transient behavior of composite plates. Results obtained from these studies show that widely used unconditionally stable β-Newmark method presents numerical instability problems in the transient simulation of delaminated composite plate structures with large deformation. To overcome this instability issue, an energy and momentum conserving composite implicit time integration scheme presented by Bathe and Baig is used for the nonlinear dynamic analysis. It is also found that a proper selection of the penalty parameter is very crucial in the simulation of contact condition. It is shown that an improper selection of penalty parameter in the augmented Lagrangian formulation may lead to erroneous prediction of dynamic response of composite delaminated plates. Uncertainties associated with the mathematical characterization of a structure can lead to unreliable damage detection. Composite structures also show considerable scatter in their structural response due to large uncertainties associated with their material properties. Probabilistic analysis is carried out to estimate material uncertainty effects in the nonlinear frequencies of composite plates. Monte Carlo Simulation with Latin Hypercube Sampling technique is used to obtain the variance of linear and nonlinear natural frequencies of the plate due to randomness in its material properties. Numerical results are obtained for composite plates with different aspect ratio, stacking sequence and oscillation amplitude ratio. It is found that the nonlinear frequencies show increasing non-Gaussian probability density function with increasing amplitude of vibration and show dual peaks at high amplitude ratios. This chaotic nature of the dispersion of nonlinear eigenvalues is also revealed in eigenvalue sensitivity analysis. For fault isolation, variations in natural frequencies, modal curvatures and curvature damage factors due to damage are investigated. Effects of various physical uncertainties like, material and geometric uncertainties on the success of damage detection is studied. A robust structural damage detection system is developed based on the statistical information available from the probabilistic analysis carried out on beam type structures. A new fault isolation technique called sliding window defuzzifier is proposed to maximize the success rate of a Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) in damage detection. Using the changes in structural measurements between the damaged and undamaged state, a fuzzy system is generated and the rule-base and membership functions are generated using probabilistic informations. The FLS is demonstrated using frequency and mode shape based measurements for various beam type structures such as uniform cantilever beam, tapered beam in single as well as in multiple damage conditions. The robustness of the FLS is demonstrated with respect to the highly uncertain input information called measurement deltas (MDs). It is said, if uncertainty level is larger than or close to the changes in damage indicator due to damage, the true information would be submerged in the noise. Then the actual damaged members may not be identified accurately and/or the healthy members may be wrongly detected as damaged giving false warning. However, this being the case, the proposed FLS with new fault isolation technique tested with these noisy data having large variation and overlaps shows excellent robustness. It is observed that the FLS accurately predicts and isolates the damage levels up-to considerable uncertainty and noise levels in single as well as multiple damage conditions. The robustness of the FLS is also demonstrated for delamination detection in composite plates having very high material property uncertainty. Effects of epistemic uncertainty on damage detection in composite plates is addressed. The effectiveness of the proposed refined Reddy type shear deformable composite plate element is demonstrated for reducing the modeling or epistemic uncertainty in delamination detection.