On Developing Smart IoT-Based Distributed System for Remote Detection of Slope Movements

Landslides or slope failures cause significant damage to the transportation infrastructure worldwide, resulting in billions of dollars of property damage. The initial slope movement of highway slopes, caused by environmental factors and man-made activities, must be detected early to prevent significant losses in infrastructure damages and human lives. However, traditional monitoring approaches for slope movement, such as periodic human inspection and surveying, are labor-intensive and time-consuming. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and high-speed internet, the potential to use such technologies for monitoring remote earth movement of highway embankments is becoming increasingly important. This paper presents an IoT-based distributed system for the early detection of slope movements to assist transportation authorities in immediately repairing the slope before a major failure occurs. We built a laboratory prototype embankment, equipped with various IoT sensors (e.g., tilt, moisture, and tensiometer sensors), that simulate a failure-prone slope to evaluate the effectiveness of our system. A user-friendly GUI is developed to enable users to utilize the system remotely. The collected sensory data for four months allowed us to analyze the soil hydrologic dynamics and the slope performance by detecting changes in the slope tilting both parallel (pitch) and perpendicular (roll). The experimental results showed that our system could detect negligible movement (1mm) and rotation (0.02°) of slopes.