In this paper, a structural damage identification method (SDIM) is developed for cylindrical shells and the numerically simulated damage identification tests are conducted to study the feasibility of the proposed SDIM. The SDIM is derived from the frequency response function solved from the structural dynamic equations of damaged cylindrical shells. A damage distribution function is used to represent the distribution and magnitudes of the local damages within a cylindrical shell. In contrast with most existing modal parameters-based SDIMs which require the modal parameters measured in both intact and damaged states, the present SDIM requires only the FRF-data measured in the damaged state. By virtue of utilizing FRF-data, one is able to make the inverse problem of damage identification well-posed by choosing as many sets of excitation frequency and FRF measurement point as needed to obtain a sufficient number of equations.