Structural Health Monitoring Systems Design

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) allows for triggering timely and cost efficient remedial actions to structures to counter deterioration, damage, peak loads and unintended use if effective systems are applied. Monitoring systems can be of support in maintaining safety for people, protecting the environment and minimising asset life-cycle costs.
All potential benefits are in fact not always realised. Poorly designed SHM systems can incur increased life-cycle costs and lead to production losses or other disturbances through triggering unnecessary or inappropriate rehabilitation actions.
The concept of Value of Information (VoI) for the pre-posterior Bayesian decision analysis can be used to predict if a SHM strategy is beneficial prior to its implementation and provides thus the basis for SHM systems design. The VoI is calculated with probabilistic structural models accounting for uncertainties of the structural performance, the relationship between monitored performance indicators and life-cycle costs, reliability and safety as well as uncertainties in the precision of the applied monitoring techniques.
In this project approaches, model and tools are developed to facilitate an efficient and VoI based design of SHM systems.