An Autonomous Computing Approach towards Monitoring of Civil Engineering Structures

Engineering structures such as bridges, tunnels, dams or towers are beginning to approach their service lifetime. To give an example, more than 20,000 bridges in Germany currently require immediate rehabilitation; similar situations apply in other countries. Thus, efficient and cost-effective structural health monitoring systems are needed to ensure serviceability and structural safety through permanent monitoring and reliable safety assessment. Backed by the recent advances in engineering technologies and computing methods, structural health monitoring has the potential to accurately identify damages and deteriorations of structures at an early stage, resulting in significantly reduced repair and maintenance costs. In this paper, the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel generation of intelligent, self-managing structural health monitoring systems is presented, introducing a prototype called “autonomous monitoring system based on software agents” (AMBOS). It provides autonomous controls, executes relevant monitoring processes in real-time and supports the involved human experts in a pro-active fashion.