Optimization of sensor placement for structural health monitoring: a review

The deployment cost of the structural health monitoring (SHM) system is the major argument against the more widespread use of the structural health monitoring techniques. Optimization of sensor placement offers an opportunity to reduce the cost of the SHM system without compromising on the quality of the monitoring approach. Several studies in the area of optimization of sensor placement for SHM applications have been undertaken but the approach has been rather application specific. This article is an attempt to present an unbiased state of the art of the work carried out in the area. The article is targeted towards researchers working in the field of structural health monitoring and optimization of sensor placement as well as practising engineers. This article reviews the work in the area of optimization of sensor placement. It first presents the definition of the optimization problem and then describes each step of the optimization. The current state of the art is then classified based on the techniques for which the optimization of sensor placement has been optimized. The article covers vibration-based monitoring, strain monitoring and elastic wave-based monitoring, as in the eyes of the authors these three techniques are most commonly used and accepted in the SHM community. The article later discusses the different optimization algorithms that have been applied in the literature. The article highlights the different pitfalls of the optimization algorithms and the countermeasures different researchers have proposed to overcome the known shortcomings. In the later section, the multi-objective optimization or the problem definition, keeping in mind the structural as well as executional demands, is discussed. A section has also been developed to showcase the use of optimization of sensor placement techniques’ data fusion–based systems.