BIM-based structural health monitoring and early warning for heritage timber structures

An early warning system in the structural health monitoring (SHM) of an engineering system ensures its survival with protective measures. However, most existing SHM systems have problems in dealing with a large amount of collected data and difficulties in identifying the damaged locations with little or no capability to visualize the problems. Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology has great advantages in information integration, visualization and secondary development, and its application to SHM can help solve these problems. A BIMbased management platform is developed in this paper with multi-dimensional BIM model with multi-source information integration for more relevant and convenient protection of heritage timber structures. A dualindicator early warning mechanism for long-term static monitoring of structures is proposed. A strategy to backtrack the cause leading to the warning raised is also proposed. The effectiveness of the above system is illustrated with studies on a Chinese heritage timber structure.