ABSTRACT
Structural Health Monitoring systems are increasingly being used for early detection of damage in civil structures. System control and maintenance, data collection, storage, analytical techniques and user interfaces must all be considered when designing such systems. Asset managers, engineers and researchers have somewhat different though complimentary needs -this too influences the system design.
A Structural Health Monitoring system based on a distributed architecture provides a reliable, robust and scalable solution, accommodating new data sources and analytical techniques as they become available. In this work, the key challenges faced when designing a large-scale SHM system are discussed. We describe a system architecture that addresses those challenges and present a case study - that of a SHM system installed on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We also discuss how researchers can use the system to design and implement data collection ‘experiments” without compromising operations of systems in production use.
