Crack location identification, as one key destination of structural health monitoring, is still a challenge for operating rotor systems. The operating deflection shape (ODS), which represents a visual description of the structural vibration patterns under operating conditions, has been gaining importance for structure damage detection in recent years. The ODS carries damage information of a structure, however, it is also difficult to detect weak cracks of rotor directly. The approximate waveform capacity dimension (AWCD) method was successfully applied to damage detection of plates and beam-like structures. In this paper,a strategic approach that combines ODS and weighted AWCD is proposed for crack location identification of the rotating rotor.To eliminate the false peaks of AWCD and obtain desirable results, a weight factor and ODS curvature data are introduced to the expression of the weighted AWCD. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by numerical simulation and experimental investigation in a cracked rotor system. The results indicate that the proposed approach not only provides good identifying performance for incipient rotor cracks, but also effectively eliminates the fault peaks introduced by the inflexion locations of ODSs. Moreover, the proposed approach proves promising in detecting crack locations of rotating rotor systems. Crack location identification, as one key destination of structural health monitoring, is still a challenge for operating rotor systems. The operating deflection shape (ODS), which represents a visual description of the structural vibration patterns under operating conditions, has been gaining importance for the structure damage detection in recent years. The ODS carries damage information of a structure, however, it is also difficult to detect weak cracks of rotor directly. The approximate waveform capacity dimension (AWCD) method was successfully applied to damage detection of plates and beam-like structures. In this paper, a strategic approach that combines ODS and weighted AWCD is proposed for crack identification identification of the rotating rotor. To eliminate the false peaks of AWCD and obtain desirable results, a weight factor and ODS curvature data are introduced to the expression of the weighted AWCD. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by numerical simulation and exp The results indicate that the proposed approach not only provides good identifying performance for incipient rotor cracks, but also effectively eliminates the fault peaks introduced by the inflexion locations of ODSs. Moreover, the proposed approach proves promising in detecting crack locations of rotating rotor systems.