Advancements in Optimal Sensor Placement for Enhanced Structural Health Monitoring: Current Insights and Future Prospects

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is critical to maintaining safe and reliable civil infrastructure, but the optimal design of an SHM sensing system, i.e., optimal sensor placement (OSP), remains a complex challenge. Based on the existing literature, this paper presents a comprehensive review of OSP strategies for SHM. It covers the key steps in OSP, from evaluation criteria to efficient optimization algorithms. The evaluation criteria are classified into six groups, while the optimization algorithms are roughly categorized into three classes. The advantages and disadvantages of each group of methods have been summarized, aiming to benefit the OSP strategy selection in future projects. Then, the real-world implementation of OSP on bridges, high-rise buildings, and other engineering structures, is presented. Based on the current progress, the challenges of OSP are recognized; its future development directions are recommended. This study equips researchers/practitioners with an integrated perspective on state-of-the-art OSP. By highlighting key developments, persistent challenges, and prospects, it is expected to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Wireless Sensor Placement Optimization for Bridge Health Monitoring: A Critical Review

“…In practical structural health monitoring (SHM) systems, there may be challenges in accurately distinguishing identified mode shapes from one another, thereby potentially compromising the precision of vibration analysis [81][82][83][84]. Hence, it is advisable to utilize measures of information effectiveness, such as the modal assurance criterion (MAC) [22,25,27,[85][86][87][88][89], modal strain energy (MSE) [21,23,24,90,91], singular value decomposition ratio (SVDR) [26,[92][93][94], least square method (LSM) [95][96][97], and Fisher information matrix (FIM) [98][99][100][101][102][103][104], to assess the linear independence of identified mode shapes.…”

Genetic Multi-Objective Optimization of Sensor Placement for SHM of Composite Structures

“…There are a plenty of different optimal-sensor-placement (OSP) strategies for SHM. A systematic review on different approaches can be found in [9][10][11]. From these optimization strategies, one group is of sequential-based sensor placement strategies where subsequent steps are based on sequentially eliminated sensor locations that contribute less to the objective 2 of 15 functions [10,12] or otherwise by adding sensor locations that enhance the value of the evaluation function [10,13].…”