2 Impact of industry 4.0 technologies on structural health monitoring

Structural health monitoring (SHM) and non-destructive test (NDT) methods are significant tools in ensuring structural safety, reliability, integrity, and minimal structural maintenance. Industry 4.0 technologies, for example, Internet of things (IoT), Blockchain, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and Data Mining have recently received significant interest in SHM due to their ability to improve the SHM systems in terms of performance, automation, cost-effectiveness, and safety, for example. In recent years, traditional SHM approaches have been rapidly upgraded to IoT-based, Internet of Drone (IoD)-based, and data mining-based SHM. This is due to the fact that conventional methods are limited by their high cost and non-real-time SHM. Moreover, the implementation of blockchain-based SHM as an emerging decentralized database technology has been identified for improving the security of data collection. Additionally, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in the aforementioned Industry 4.0 technologies. Therefore, IoT, blockchain, IoD, and data mining have been applied to enhance SHM strategies. In this regard, this chapter presents the most recent advanced emerging technologies employed in SHM. To this end, a brief background of these technologies is discussed in this chapter. Then, the development of these advances and current applications in SHM are presented with the aim of showing the benefits and efficiency of these technologies.