Distributed scalable architectures for health monitoring of aerospace structures

In recent studies, monitoring the health of certain aerospace structures has been shown to be a key step in reducing the life cycle costs for structural maintenance and inspection. Since the health of the structures ultimately determines the health of a vehicle, health monitoring is also an important prerequisite for improved aviation safety. In this paper, we present the preliminary results from our ongoing project on designing and evaluating architectures for integrated structural health monitoring. It has three major contributions. First, we present a survey of existing work. Second, we identify the characteristics of architectures for integrated health monitoring. Finally, we suggest evaluation metrics for a few characteristics.