Structural health monitoring using the semantic wireless: a novel application for wireless networking

The evolving structural health monitoring (SHM) targets monitoring the in-situ behavior of a structure such as a bridge, assessing its performance, detecting damage or deterioration, and determining the structure condition or health. For SHM systems to gain further effectiveness and reliability, the state-of-the-art of SHM systems needs to make use of the quantum jump achieved in the field of information technology and wireless communications. This paper presents a proposed system through which wireless and information technologies (IT) based techniques and methods are deployed, with the goal that these could lead to the development of commercial, cost-effective, yet reliable SHM systems. This incorporates the use of innovative sensing technologies, the deployment of communications and the application of artificial intelligence techniques to establish damage detection methods that use deductive reasoning technologies to effectively monitor and intelligently detect structural performance under various loads.