Sensor Placement Optimization for Structural Health Monitoring

When designing a system for structural health monitoring, one must decide how to optimally deploy sensor systems to obtain information beneficial to the management of the structure. In this paper, we present a methodology for making these decisions based on a probabilistic graphical model representing the structure to be monitored, as well as actions undertaken by infrastructure managers in monitoring and maintaining the structure. A value of information metric is used to quantify the benefit of different proposed sensor placement schemes. A greedy algorithm heuristic is used to optimize sensor placements based on this metric. This methodology is demonstrated on an example structural health monitoring problem based on fiber optic strain gauge measurements of the Sherman and Joyce Bowie Scott Hall, under construction on the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.