High Quality Sensor Placement for SHM Systems: Refocusing on Application Demands

Abstract

Abstract-There are heavy studies recently on applying wireless sensor networks for structural health monitoring. These works usually focus on the computer science aspect, and the considerations include energy consumption, network connectivity, etc. It is commonly believed that for the current resource limited wireless sensors, system design could be more efficient if the application requirements are incorporated. Nevertheless, we often find that, rather than integration, assumptions have to be made due to lack of knowledge of civil engineering; for example, to evaluate routing algorithms, the sensor placement is assumed to be random or on grids/trees. These may not be practically meaningful to the respective application demands, and make the great efforts by the computer science community on developing efficient methods from the sensor network aspect less useful.In this paper, we study the very first problem of the SHM systems: the sensor placement and focus on the civil requirements. We first study the current general framework of structure health monitoring. We redevelop the framework that includes a new sensor placement module. This module implements the most widely accepted sensor placement scheme from civil engineering but focusing on its usefulness for computer science. It provides such interfaces that can rank the placement quality of the candidate locations in a step by step manner. We then optimize system performance by considering network connectivity and data routing issues; with the objective on energy efficiency.We evaluate our scheme using the data from the structural health monitoring system on the Ting Kau Bridge, Hong Kong. We show that a uniform and a state-of-the-art placement are not very meaningful in placement quality. Our scheme achieves almost the same sensor placement quality with that of the civil engineering with five-fold improvement in system lifetime. We conduct an experiment on the in-built Guangzhou New TV Tower, China; and the results validate the effectiveness of our scheme.

Survey of Sensor Placement Methods for Structural Health Monitoring

“…A sensor deployment module using EI is proposed in [22]. This is the first interdisciplinary attempt that integrates the constraints from the civil engineering and the requirements from the computer science that are imposed on WSNs for the sensor placement.…”

“…After finding initial sensor locations through the QR factorization of the mode matrix of a structure, sequential sensor placement method determines an optimal sensor position one at a time. Finally, the genetic algorithm is applied to determine the globally optimal sensor locations SPEM [22] Combined SPEM is an interdisciplinary approach for an OSP problem that integrates both the constraints from the civil engineering and the requirements imposed on a WSN from the computer science domain. energy SPEM [23] Combined SPEM is improved by considering the amount of the energy consumption of a sensor node.…”

“…There have been a lot of proposals for the OSP in the context of WSNs. Good surveys could be found in [21][22][23]. However, they focus on satisfying the requirements of various applications using WSNs, such as area coverage, network connectivity, netw ork longevity, and data fidelity, without considering the SHM requirements from the civil engineering domain.…”

Incorporating emergency alarms in reliable wireless process control

“…Case studies on wireless structural monitoring and control systems were reported in [20,21,27,28]. Realtime transmission scheduling and co-designs for WSANs has been investigated in [11,24,25,31].…”

Demo Abstract: Towards a Wireless Building Management System with Minimum Change to the Building Protocols

“…Recently, researchers have found that it is also fruitful to apply wireless sensor networks to existing applications to replace or partially replace the wired infrastructure. One example is structural health monitoring (SHM) using wireless sensor networks [3]. The wireless feature has great advantages ranging from a cheaper price, to easy system deployment and modification.…”