A wireless sensor network monitoring system for highway bridges

As wireless smart sensor networks and geographical information systems (GIS) are evolving nowadays, applications of remote monitoring in wide spread geographical areas are becoming cost-effective and possible. An example of such applications is the structural health status monitoring of highway bridges that connect roads in both rural and urban areas. Many of these bridges are subject to deterioration due to external and internal factors. Online, real-time structural health monitoring is a resourceful complimentary tool to facilitate rapid field inspection. Bridge maintenance and infrastructure managers can easily use this application to safeguard the performance and safety of these vital structures. This paper presents an autonomous wireless sensor network system to monitor structural health in highways bridges. The proposed system consists of a wireless Data Acquisition Unit (DAQ), a mobile public network, a structural health data evaluation, a management middleware, a GIS and graphical user interface module. The sensors in the DAQ gather the bridge health signs and transmit them promptly via the public mobile networks to the management and evaluation middleware for further processing. Based on the national bridge inventory rating scale, an early warning fuzzy logic based engine is developed to process the status of a given bridge and alert the concerned operator/s regarding any abnormality. Furthermore, an interactive Google map is used to show the status of each bridge along with its exact location. A prototype was built in the laboratory to validate the proposed system. Analysis of testing results and comparisons with existing monitoring systems are also discussed. Operators can access the bridge real-time data through mobile phone. The system is cost effective and user friendly.