Enabling framework for structural health monitoring using smart sensors

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an important tool for the ongoing maintenance of aging infrastructure. The ultimate goals of implementing an SHM system are to improve infrastructure maintenance, increase public safety, and minimize the economic impact of an extreme loading event by streamlining repair and retrofit measures. Networks of wireless smart sensors offer tremendous promise for accurate and continuous structural monitoring using a dense array of inexpensive sensors; however, hurdles still remain. Although smart sensors have been commercially available for nearly a decade, full-scale implementation for civil infrastructure has been lacking, with the exception of a few short-term demonstration projects. This slow progress is due in part to the fact that programming smart sensors is extremely complex, putting the use of these devices for all but the simplest tasks out of the reach of most engineers. This article presents an enabling, open-source framework for SHM using networks of wireless smart sensors. The framework is based on a service-oriented architecture that is modular, reusable, and extensible, thus allowing engineers to more readily realize the potential of smart sensing technology. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework, an example SHM application is provided. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.