Towards Cyber-Physical Systems Design for Structural Health Monitoring

Large civil structures, such as bridges, buildings, and aerospace vehicles form the backbone of our society are critical to some catastrophic events such as damage. Wired sensor networks are usually adopted for structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. This is also an important Smart City application. Recent wireless sensor networks (WSNs) technology promises the eventual ability to cover such a structure and continuously monitor its health. However, researchers from both engineering and computer science domains face numerous hurdles, such as application-specific requirements, in reaching this goal. These hurdles have a cumulative effect on severely resource-constrained WSNs. This article provides a comprehensive investigation of WSN-based SHM applications with an emphasis on networking perspectives to get insights into a cyber-physical system (CPS) design. First , we provide the SHM philosophy and conduct extensive comparative studies regarding various aspects of benefits and hurdles of going wireless for SHM. Second , we propose a taxonomy of SHM techniques and their applicability to WSNs. Third , we show a transition from the WSN-based SHM towards the CPS design, expecting that such a design will mitigate WSN resource constraints and satisfy SHM application-specific requirements to a great extent. For each of these, we discuss a surge of existing schemes with an emphasis on limitations of the state-of-the-art, and we point out open issues. Finally , we propose a series of design guidelines for a potential CPS. This article will help both engineering and computer science domain researchers/engineers and respective communities in designing future CPS to ensure the economic benefit and public safety in functioning civil structures.