Structural Health Monitoring using Sensor Networks

We have developed a software package, SPEM (Sensor Placement using EFI Model, a widely adopted method from civil and structural engineering). We hope it is useful for the computer science community when making assumptions for sensor placement. The help documents are included in the package. We have a demo. Videos for how to use SPEM: (1) SAP2000, (2) SPEM.

We have a paper describing some knowledge of structural health monitoring and our design of an efficient sensor system. We plan to add more explanation and a tutorial soon.

For structure health monitoring using sensor networks for the GuangZhou New TV Tower, Please visit http://www.cse.polyu.edu.hk/benchmark/

Our project won Gold Medal, the 37th International Exhibition of Inventions, Geneva, Switzerland, April 2009. See our corner. A video from Xinhua TV (in Chinese).

The state-of-the-art sensor motes (e.g., Imote2) are very powerful in the processing unit, communication capability and storage capacity. It is inferior in the sensing module (e.g., the ITS400). We thus designed a sensing module to close this gap so that the sensors developed by the computer science community can be applied in structural health monitoring. See our demo. Videos for this demo: step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4 (will be put on soon, available upon request).

For sensor data collection of high-rising buildings, we consider neither one-hop long-range communication nor hop-by-hop short-range communication is efficient enough. We propose to use elevators to assist data collection. We studied traffic scheduling, and cross-layer optimization when the elevators are taking into consideration.