Survey of Sensor Placement Methods for Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems use various sensors to diagnose the health of a structure in real time. Recently, wireless sensors are getting more attention because it can give a SHM system more flexibility than wired sensors. In this system, to identify the dynamic behavior of a structure, the minimum number of sensor nodes needs to be deployed while providing adequate amount of information to reduce the cost of a system and avoid the duplication of information. Therefore, an optimal sensor placement (OSP) becomes an important engineering issue to minimize the number of sensors and increase the accuracy of the assessment based on the sensor measurements. In the networking and computer science communities, the optimal sensor placement (OSP) problem has been one of the key research topics on wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Even though there have been a lot of proposals for the OSP in the context of WSNs, they focus on satisfying the requirements of various applications using WSNs, such as area coverage, network connectivity, network longevity, and data fidelity, without considering the SHM requirements from the civil engineering domain. Therefore, the sensors located at the optimal positions satisfying the network requirements may not provide valuable information to judge the health of a structure. Therefore, in this paper, we survey the OSP methods considering the requirements of the civil engineering and discuss their key ideas. In addition, we introduce notable WSNs deployed for the SHM in the field.