Multiagent Architecture for Bridge Capacity Measurement System Using Wireless Sensor Network and Weight in Motion

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has played important roles in various aspects of life including in bridge structural health monitoring system. Due to environmental and operational circumstances, a bridge needs to be monitored to make sure its continuous availability and operational safety. The structural stiffness of a bridge will decrease after some period of time due to structural strength declining and cracking. The change in bending stiffness will change the structural dynamic characteristics of the bridge and its capacity. Therefore, an automatic assessment system for bridge capacity is required. This article proposes the development of data acquisition and processing method for bridge capacity determination using its dynamic response, based on agent-based in-network processing. The use of WSN in bridge capacity monitoring and diagnostic also allows for sending warning messages to the control room. Experiment in the laboratory-scale bridge is performed to test the proposed system performance and the result was well validated with the finite-element analysis (FEA) results with modal assurance criterion value 0.90 that shows the high correlation degree between the FEA and the experiment. In addition, the processing time and energy consumption are compared with previous similar work, which shows the efficiency of the proposed system.