Agent based routing approach to support structural health monitoring-informed, intelligent transportation system

In structural health monitoring (SHM)-informed intelligent transportation systems (ITS) system, SHM sensors can provide data on a bridge health condition for ITS applications. Where ITS uses this bridge health condition information for real-time traffic management and monitoring. Most of the SHM-informed ITS use wireless sensor network (WSN) to allow devices to coordinate and collaborate to effectively measure a structure, whether the goal is to improve spatial resolution, structural resilience, bridge traffic, or perform advanced in-situ analysis. The WSN suffers from high power consumption, yet they are generally equipped with a limited power supply and in most cases AAA batteries. Even under the most stringent power management, the sensor nodes have an unattended life of approximately a few months to a year. Towards this end, the paper proposes a multi-agent based system to augment the life time of WSN supporting SHM-informed ITS systems. The proposed agent based routing (ABR) approach consists of a mobile agent that is able to traverse the network, i.e., sensor nodes, mounted onto a bridge using multi-hop communication; collecting and aggregate the data, thus eliminating the two major causes of power consumption. These include (a) the direct transmission/broadcast from each sensor node to the sink and (b) redundant sensory data. In addition, ABR reduce much of the communication overhead and hence prolong the operational lifetime of SHM-informed ITS. Our experiment conducted on an open source simulator shows that the proposed ABR is 30% more energy efficient in comparison to the baseline, i.e., direct transmission to the sink.