An evaluation on the multi-agent system based structural health monitoring for large scale structures

Different kinds of sensors have to be adopted to have a reliable monitoring of large scale engineering structures. Multi-agent system (MAS) based structural health monitoring (SHM) technology is researched to deal with the diverse, heterogeneous and distributed information. This paper introduces an evaluation on a multi-agent system based structural health monitoring to validate the efficiency of the multi-agent technology. Through the cooperation of different agents and different subsystems, the whole system can fuse three kinds of sensor information including strain gauge sensor, fiber optic sensor and piezoelectric sensor, can automatically choose sensing object, can self-organize the sensor network and discard useless sensor data, and can recognize three typical kinds of structure states which may indicate structural damages including impact load, joint failure, strain distribution change on every substructure and the edge area between two adjacent substructures. In the evaluation work besides adopting conventional monitoring instruments, the strain signal of the strain gauge is also demonstrated to be monitored by smart wireless sensor with on-board microprocessor developed in the lab. In this paper the evaluated experimental aluminium plate and the sensor distribution are firstly introduced. The corresponding agents are defined based of the designed multi-agent system frame presented by the authors. The monitoring strategies in the validation work including monitoring principle and monitoring equipments for three typical kinds of structure states are proposed. After the process of developing the impact load diagnostic agent as the basis work of the whole system is introduced in detail, the implementation of the whole multi-agent system based structural health monitoring for the plate is presented. This paper shows the efficiency of the multi-agent technology for the development of the SHM system on the large practical structures.