A systematic review of data fusion techniques for optimized structural health monitoring

Advancements in structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques have spiked in the past few decades due to the rapid evolution of novel sensing and data transfer technologies. This development has facilitated the simultaneous recording of a wide range of data, which could contain abundant damage-related features. Concurrently, the age of omnipresent data started with massive amounts of SHM data collected from large-size heterogeneous sensor networks. The abundance of information from diverse sources needs to be aggregated to enable robust decision-making strategies. Data fusion is the process of integrating various data from heterogeneous sources to produce more useful, accurate, and reliable information about system behavior. This paper reviews recent developments in data fusion techniques applied to SHM systems. The theoretical concepts, applications, benefits, and limitations of current methods and challenges in SHM are presented, and future trends in data fusion methods are discussed. Furthermore, a set of criteria is proposed to evaluate contents and information from original and review papers in this field, and a road map is provided discussing possible future work.