Digital Smart Structure: Engineering a Sensor-to-Cloud Structural Health Monitoring Pilot

Real-time monitoring of civil infrastructures is of great importance to ensure their integrity and safety. Achieving these goals requires a strong synergy between multiple tools, disciplines, and approaches, which can be realized through a joint hardware-software co-design of the different components based on the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Deploying IoT-based systems for bridge monitoring presents many challenges, including difficulties in deploying sensors in real-world testbeds, the lack of reliability of IoT devices, constant network disconnections, power outages, and challenges in rapid on-site maintenance. To address these challenges, we propose an IoT-SHM architecture that incorporates mechanisms to ensure robustness across system infrastructure, software components, data flow, and data quality. Our system was deployed on the Volto Santo bridge in Naples, where it successfully collected data for over six months, capturing more than 3000 acoustic emission events and more than 250 million accelerometer data points. Despite several interruptions due to environmental hazards, the system was able to automatically restart data collection. Additionally, we present the specifics of the testbed and a processing of the collected data based on operational modal analysis (OMA).