Sensor data management in bridge health monitoring systems

The United States is reaching a crisis in aging infrastructure. As one example, over one hundred thousand highway bridges are structurally deficient. A critical need exists for bridge health monitoring due to the increasing need for safety and security of bridges as well as conducting more reliable assessments. This targeted system should be able to support rapid short-term emergency response and long-term health condition assessment. The main objective of this research is to address general architectural concepts for the development and implementation of a distributed real-time structural health monitoring protocol system, which includes hardware and software platforms.; Generally, this monitoring system involves the following four components: real-time database management system, data analysis and diagnostic strategies, distributed decision-making, and wireless communication and security. As an initial research investigation, the sensor data management protocol system has to be implemented first because of the significance of the sensor data, which is our research pivot. Our goal is to build a sensor data management protocol system, which can integrate the above-mentioned components and make proper assumptions for system design. This sensor data management system consists of a data acquisition subsystem, a database management subsystem and a data retrieval subsystem. We describe the components of each subsystem in details and how to integrate them together to have a complete remotely monitoring system. Bridge health monitoring is used as one application in this research. A bridge health monitoring web site has been implemented as a demonstration.