Agent-Based Approach to Smart Sensing for Health Monitoring of Civil Infrastructure

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This investigation seeks to develop a broad foundation for innovative smart sensing and health monitoring concepts utilizing advanced sensing, micro-processing, digital signal processing, wireless communication, and damage diagnostic methods. This work is aimed at providing near real-time structural condition assessment for extreme events (e.g., strong earthquakes), as well as long-term deterioration. The goal is to develop a computational framework that can take full advantage of the continuous and periodic wireless monitoring strategy and that can automatically and reliably detect possible damage locations or deteriorated regions in a structure. Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems represent an important new way of analyzing, designing, and implementing complex distributed computing systems represented by smart sensors. The Mote platform developed at the University of California at Berkeley with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offers, for the first time, an open hardware/ software environment for broad smart sensing research and will be employed as a basis for this research. The comprehensive research plan has four primary tasks: (i) design and construct new high sensitivity acceleration and strain sensors for the Berkeley-Mote platform to facilitate global/local monitoring of civil infrastructure systems, (ii) conceptualize, develop, and implement an agent-based framework for monitoring and damage detection in civil infrastructure systems based on the Berkeley-Mote platform, (iii) develop new structural health monitoring algorithms that can be executed in the smart sensor's distributed computing environment, and (iv) prototype and test developed hardware and software in both the laboratory and field environment. This effort includes a significant US-China collaborative portion with three institutions. Successful completion of this research is expected to accelerate economic and practical implementation of innovative strategies for protecting our respective nations' infrastructure.