Iot For Structural Health Monitoring: Ieee Instrumentation and Measurement Magazine December 2018
Iot For Structural Health Monitoring: Ieee Instrumentation and Measurement Magazine December 2018
Iot For Structural Health Monitoring: Ieee Instrumentation and Measurement Magazine December 2018
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S
tructural Health Monitoring (SHM) concerns the The network used to interconnect SOs can be based on ex-
continuous monitoring of civil and industrial isting internet standards [1]. This permits a simple integration
buildings to increase human safety and to reduce of the SHM into more general systems such as smart buildings
maintenance costs. The SHM system furnishes information and smart cities, smart infrastructure and smart industry.
about the alterations in a single part or in the whole struc- Moreover, the sensitivity of the detection of the structural
ture caused by materials aging, action of the environment, or damage and continuous monitoring [3] permits important fea-
accidental events. Typically, SHM systems are devoted to mon- tures to be achieved such as the timely detection of dangerous
itoring: humidity, temperature, accelerations, tensile stress, states and the storing of monitoring information. Both of these
compressive stress, and building materials degradation. The features introduce the capability of the monitoring system to
methods used are non-invasive and require the deployment implement criteria for providing a prognosis about the resid-
of sensors in checkpoints well defined by the experts. The in- ual life of the structure or to optimize its maintenance.
formation from the sensors is merged with the mathematical The interesting aspect about the introduction of the IoT
models to determine the structure safety. paradigm in the SHM system [2] regards the applicative sce-
The sensors are smart since they are not only able to mea- narios that include: bridge monitoring [4], historical masonry
sure the physical quantities of interest but elaborate them structures monitoring [5], foundation earth monitoring [6], or
and are able to transmit the information through the inter- alteration of the structure materials [7].
net to take decisions. Each sensor is a Smart Object (SO) and In this paper, to boost the research in improving the capabil-
the whole SHM is an implementation of the Internet of Things ity of structure inspection and to determine the requirements
(IoT) [1], [2] paradigm. arising from the distribution of the IoT node to imple-
The information is sent in the cloud by internet connection ment SHM systems, an advanced SHM technique based on
to permit elaboration by distributed systems and Big Data par- ultrasonic inspection or Acoustic Emission (AE) will be sum-
adigms for their management. The time correlation among the marized. The features evaluated by the emission of ultrasonic
data permits analysis that evaluates the structural degradation waves in the structure and the acquisition of the eco permits
and automatically alerts the users. the system to determine the presence of damage in the struc-
The implementation of SHM system by the IoT para- ture and its position. In addition, the AE can be used to detect
digm permits new technologies to be adopted to improve the damage formation. To coordinate the measurement pro-
the efficiency and the reliability of the developed monitor- cess from the IoT SOs and to use the measurement results in the
ing system. Typically, IoT systems use wireless networks model describing the evolution of the structure under inves-
to share data among SOs. In the case of SHM, wireless net- tigation, it is necessary to synchronize the SOs' clocks. There
works permit sensors to be easily allocated in the space are several synchronization techniques that can be applied
and positioned on the monitoring point indicated by the to the IoT SOs, and it is necessary to select the most advanta-
structural experts, increasing the sensitivity of the whole geous one. In fact, it is necessary to consider the applicative
monitoring system. This permits an increase in the efficiency scenario's time constrains and the desired maximum synchro-
of the monitoring and reduces the monitoring system costs nization delay.
with respect to the case of the adoption of a wired ad-hoc net- The paper is organized as follows: preliminarily, the
work technology. IoT paradigm integration in the SHM system is provided;
The research presented in this paper is a scientific extension of the work presented
at IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Industry 4.0 and IoT 2018 [2].
is used to generate alarms managed typically by humans, sense of time to its neighbors. The evaluation of the synchro-
where delay in the order of seconds can be acceptable. On the nization time is performed by each node by using the time
other side, the higher levels of the structure mainly use the in- information of the neighbors and a linear regression of these
ternet to communicate. data. The FTSP synchronizes the whole network by electing
At lower levels of the IoT-SHM hierarchy, a typical task is a reference node based on the smallest node identifier which
the localization of the damage. Passive acoustic localization serves as time source. The reference node periodically floods
is used in the cases where the structure emits a recognizable its clock through the network.
sound picked up by a distributed array of SO. Then, the source PulseSync protocol: employs rapid-flooding to reduce
position is reconstructed by measuring the difference in arrival the effect of waiting times on the synchronization accuracy.
times [14]. This requires the SO to be synchronized up to a frac- PulseSync propagates time information from a reference node
tion of the expected time differences of arrivals for the system as fast as possible. Apart from the rapid flooding approach,
to be able to produce accurate location estimates. To this aim, each node uses a linear regression table to estimate the clock of
the SO clock has a resolution of microseconds and the synchro- the reference node, as in FTSP.
nization messages are exchanged on proprietary networks. In Flooding with clock speed agreement (FCSA): utilizes flooding
the same structure, local area networks with particular routers together with clock speed agreement to optimize the synchro-
that give priority to the transmission of the synchronization nization error between the reference node and the remaining
messages, or that compensate for the transmission delay, can nodes in the network. This approach leads to a significant ad-
be deployed. In these cases synchronization accuracy in the vantage: FCSA can be used for synchronizing sensor network
order of microseconds is still achievable. In fact, for the SHM to a stable time source.
system the typical accuracy needed between the node is in the Gradient time synchronization protocol (GTSP): aims at opti-
range [0.6, 9.0] μs. mizing local skew in WSNs. GTSP is completely decentralized,
and synchronization messages received from neighboring
IoT-SHM Synchronization Methods nodes are used to adjust clocks. Using a simple algorithm
The performances of the IoT-SHM synchronization methods based on averaging the time information received from neigh-
are reported in Table 1. Among the methods used in the syn- bors, the sensor nodes agree on a common clock frequency
chronization [15] for this kind of application there are: and clock value. As a consequence, each sensor node synchro-
Reference broadcast synchronization (RBS): in which a refer- nizes to its neighboring nodes and there is not any special node
ence node is used to send a reference message and receive the which acts as a time reference.
messages from the other nodes in reply, estimating the time External gradient time synchronization protocol (EGSync):
offset for each node. Naturally, the limitation of this method is each sensor node synchronizes to a reference node by using
related to the visibility of the reference node among all of the time information flooded by this node, as well as synchro-
nodes composing the system and that the number of nodes nizes to its neighboring nodes by employing an agreement
must be limited. If this requirement cannot be satisfied the syn- algorithm. Hence, EGSync is able to achieve external synchro-
chronization accuracy decreases drastically. nization by optimizing the synchronization error among the
Time sync protocol for sensor network (TPSN): also in this case, neighboring nodes.
there is a reference node but the synchronization process pre- The synchronization performances are guaranteed
liminarily generates a hierarchical structure containing all of among the SOs in the same network. However, at this level
the nodes and the visibility among the nodes is determined of the hierarchy, the internet is typically used to trans-
assigning at each node a level. Once this structure is built the mit an alarm [14], and robust communication based on
reference node starts the propagation of the sense of time to message queuing telemetry transport with reception of ac-
each inferior level. knowledgment guarantees the reception of the alarm by
Flooding time synchronization protocol (FTSP): is based on the authorities in charge of inspecting buildings or manag-
the dynamic election of a global root node that propagates the ing hazards.
science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium in 2010 and historical masonry construction, experimentation on
and 2011, respectively. FRCM and monitoring of structures through the use of acous-
tic emissions.
Renato Sante Olivito (renato.olivito@unical.it) is a Full Pro-
fessor of Structural Mechanics with the Department of Civil Domenico Luca Carnì (dlcarni@dimes.unical.it) is Assistant
Engineering University of Calabria, Rende, Italy, where he Professor of Electric and Electronic Measurements with the
has remained in a variety of research and management po- Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and Sys-
sitions. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 tems, University of Calabria. He achieved his master's degree
papers published in international journals and conference in computer engineering from the University of Calabria in
proceedings. His current research interests include ecosus- 2003. In 2006, he received the Ph.D. degree in systems and com-
tainable composite materials as a strengthening of modern puter engineering from the same university.