Towards a fully automated monitoring system for Manhole Cover: Smart cities and IOT applications

Nowadays Manhole Cover (MC) failure is on the rise and generally affects the safety, security and economy of the society. This is why the need for a fully automated monitoring system has become very essential. Automated monitoring of MC is part of the development of Smart Cities (SC) and Internet of Things (IOT) which are the targets for modern governments to control and monitor the resources in cities. This paper is a survey study on the MC issues, presenting a complete classification with analysis for these issues based on the environmental effect and including the available current monitoring techniques used. It also evaluates the use of the automated and non-automated monitoring systems and the effect of the type of the underground on the MC structure. It is shown from the study the current automated monitoring systems do not cover all the MC issues, and most of these systems are not taking into considerations all of the issues, therefore, misleading data may be found from these systems which is considered as a problem which this study contributes to overcome this problem. The classification in this paper is the first step towards design a fully automated monitoring system for MC taking into consideration the development in the SC and IOT solutions.