• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.18D no.5
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• pp.393-402
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• 2011

This paper describes a design and application of middleware that is essential to the context-aware system. We define a transducer interface protocol in order to deal with a variety of context data. For the purpose of systematic process of data between middleware modules, a message oriented middleware is designed and implemented. Memory improves the performance of high-performance computing system compared to previous strategies. Context aware middleware adopts service oriented architecture so that functions in modules may be independent and scalability can be remarkable. Using messages across modules decreases the complexity of the application development. In order to justify the usefulness of the proposed context aware middleware, we carried out our experiments in bridge health monitoring system and verified the efficacy.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.71 no.1
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• pp.57-63
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• 2019

During the last two decades, much joint research regarding vibration based methods has been done, leading to developing various algorithms and techniques. These algorithms and techniques can be divided into modal methods and signal methods. Although modal methods have been widely used for health monitoring and damage detection, signal methods due to higher efficiency have received considerable attention in various fields, including aerospace, mechanical and civil engineering. Signal-based methods are derived directly from the recorded responses through signal processing algorithms to detect damage. According to different signal processing techniques, signal-based methods can be divided into three categories including time domain methods, frequency domain methods, and time-frequency domain methods. The frequency domain methods are well-known and interest in using them has increased in recent years. To determine dynamic behaviours, to identify systems and to detect damages of bridges, different methods and algorithms have been proposed by researchers. In this study, a new algorithm to detect seismic damage in the bridge's piers is suggested. To evaluate the algorithm, an analytical model of a bridge with simple spans is used. Based on the algorithm, before and after damage, the bridge is excited by a sine force, and the piers' responses are measured. The dynamic specifications of the bridge are extracted by Power Spectral Density function. In addition, the Least Square Method is used to detect damage in the bridge's piers. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm can identify the seismic damage effectively. The algorithm is output-only method and measuring the excitation force is not needed. Moreover, the proposed approach does not need numerical models.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.197-209
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• 2010

The structural state of a bridge is currently examined by visual inspection or by wired sensor techniques, which are relatively expensive, vulnerable to inclement conditions, and time consuming to undertake. In contrast, wireless sensor networks are easy to deploy and flexible in application so that the network can adjust to the individual structure. Different sensing techniques have been used with such networks, but the acoustic emission technique has rarely been utilized. With the use of acoustic emission (AE) techniques it is possible to detect internal structural damage, from cracks propagating during the routine use of a structure, e.g. breakage of prestressing wires. To date, AE data analysis techniques are not appropriate for the requirements of a wireless network due to the very exact time synchronization needed between multiple sensors, and power consumption issues. To unleash the power of the acoustic emission technique on large, extended structures, recording and local analysis techniques need better algorithms to handle and reduce the immense amount of data generated. Preliminary results from utilizing a new concept called Acoustic Emission Array Processing to locally reduce data to information are presented. Results show that the azimuthal location of a seismic source can be successfully identified, using an array of six to eight poor-quality AE sensors arranged in a circular array approximately 200 mm in diameter. AE beamforming only requires very fine time synchronization of the sensors within a single array, relative timing between sensors of $1{\mu}s$ can easily be performed by a single Mote servicing the array. The method concentrates the essence of six to eight extended waveforms into a single value to be sent through the wireless network, resulting in power savings by avoiding extended radio transmission.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.67-76
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• 2020

This study aims to optimize the cochlea-inspired artificial filter bank (CAFB) using El-Centro seismic waveforms and test its performance through a shaking table test on a two-span bridge model. In the process of optimizing the CAFB, El-Centro seismic waveforms were used for the purpose of evaluating how they would affect the optimizing process. Next, the optimized CAFB was embedded in the developed wireless-based intelligent data acquisition (IDAQ) system to enable response measurement in real-time. For its performance evaluation to obtain a seismic response in real-time using the optimized CAFB, a two-span bridge (model structures) was installed in a large shaking table, and a seismic response experiment was carried out on it with El-Centro seismic waveforms. The CAFB optimized in this experiment was able to obtain the seismic response in real-time by compressing it using the embedded wireless-based IDAQ system while the obtained compressed signals were compared with the original signal (un-compressed signal). The results of the experiment showed that the compressed signals were superior to the raw signal in response performance, as well as in data compression effect. They also proved that the CAFB was able to compress response signals effectively in real-time even under seismic conditions. Therefore, this paper established that the CAFB optimized by being embedded in the wireless-based IDAQ system was an economical and efficient data compression sensing technology for measuring and monitoring the seismic response in real-time from structures based on the wireless sensor networks (WSNs).

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.357-362
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• 2023

Bridges are important transportation infrastructure, but they are subject to damage and cracking due to various environmental factors and constant traffic loads, which accelerate their aging. With many bridges now older than their original construction, there is a need for systems to ensure safety and diagnose deterioration. Bridges are already utilizing structural health monitoring (SHM) technology to monitor the condition of bridges in real time or periodically. Along with this technology, the development of intelligent bridge monitoring technology utilizing artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technology is underway. In this paper, we study an edge system technique for predicting bridge safety using fast Fourier transform and dimensionality reduction algorithm for maintenance of aging bridges. In particular, unlike previous studies, we investigate whether it is possible to form a dataset using sensor data collected from actual bridges and check the safety of bridges.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.673-686
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• 2022

Deep learning algorithms for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) have been extracting the interest of researchers and engineers. These algorithms commonly used loss functions and evaluation indices like the mean square error (MSE) which were not originally designed for SHM problems. An updated loss function which was specifically constructed for deep-learning-based structural damage detection problems has been proposed in this study. By tuning the coefficients of the loss function, the weights for damage localization and quantification can be adapted to the real situation and the deep learning network can avoid unnecessary iterations on damage localization and focus on the damage severity identification. To prove efficiency of the proposed method, structural damage detection using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) was conducted on a truss bridge model. Results showed that the validation curve with the updated loss function converged faster than the traditional MSE. Data augmentation was conducted to improve the anti-noise ability of the proposed method. For reducing the training time, the normalized modal strain energy change (NMSEC) was extracted, and the principal component analysis (PCA) was adopted for dimension reduction. The results showed that the training time was reduced by 90% and the damage identification accuracy could also have a slight increase. Furthermore, the effect of different modes and elements on the training dataset was also analyzed. The proposed method could greatly improve the performance for structural damage detection on both the training time and detection accuracy.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.733-744
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• 2019

Wind speed forecasting is critical for a variety of engineering tasks, such as wind energy harvesting, scheduling of a wind power system, and dynamic control of structures (e.g., wind turbine, bridge, and building). Wind speed, which has characteristics of random, nonlinear and uncertainty, is difficult to forecast. Nowadays, machine learning approaches (generalized regression neural network (GRNN), back propagation neural network (BPNN), and extreme learning machine (ELM)) are widely used for wind speed forecasting. In this study, two schemes are proposed to improve the forecasting performance of machine learning approaches. One is that optimization algorithms, i.e., cross validation (CV), genetic algorithm (GA), and particle swarm optimization (PSO), are used to automatically find the optimal model parameters. The other is that the combination of different machine learning methods is proposed by finite mixture (FM) method. Specifically, CV-GRNN, GA-BPNN, PSO-ELM belong to optimization algorithm-assisted machine learning approaches, and FM is a hybrid machine learning approach consisting of GRNN, BPNN, and ELM. The effectiveness of these machine learning methods in wind speed forecasting are fully investigated by one-year field monitoring data, and their performance is comprehensively compared.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.77-91
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• 2022

Various monitoring systems have been implemented in civil infrastructure to ensure structural safety and integrity. In long-term monitoring, these systems generate a large amount of data, where anomalies are not unusual and can pose unique challenges for structural health monitoring applications, such as system identification and damage detection. Therefore, developing efficient techniques is quite essential to recognize the anomalies in monitoring data. In this study, several machine learning techniques are explored and implemented to detect and classify various types of data anomalies. A field dataset, which consists of one month long acceleration data obtained from a long-span cable-stayed bridge in China, is employed to examine the machine learning techniques for automated data anomaly detection. These techniques include the statistic-based pattern recognition network, spectrogram-based convolutional neural network, image-based time history convolutional neural network, image-based time-frequency hybrid convolution neural network (GoogLeNet), and proposed ensemble neural network model. The ensemble model deliberately combines different machine learning models to enhance anomaly classification performance. The results show that all these techniques can successfully detect and classify six types of data anomalies (i.e., missing, minor, outlier, square, trend, drift). Moreover, both image-based time history convolutional neural network and GoogLeNet are further investigated for the capability of autonomous online anomaly classification and found to effectively classify anomalies with decent performance. As seen in comparison with accuracy, the proposed ensemble neural network model outperforms the other three machine learning techniques. This study also evaluates the proposed ensemble neural network model to a blind test dataset. As found in the results, this ensemble model is effective for data anomaly detection and applicable for the signal characteristics changing over time.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.17-28
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• 2022

The cable component of cable-stayed bridges is gradually impacted by weather conditions, vehicle loads, and material corrosion. The stayed cable is a critical load-carrying part that closely affects the operational stability of a cable-stayed bridge. Damaged cables might lead to the bridge collapse due to their tension capacity reduction. Thus, it is necessary to develop structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques that accurately identify damaged cables. In this work, a combinational identification method of three efficient techniques, including statistical analysis, clustering, and neural network models, is proposed to detect the damaged cable in a cable-stayed bridge. The measured dataset from the bridge was initially preprocessed to remove the outlier channels. Then, the theory and application of each technique for damage detection were introduced. In general, the statistical approach extracts the parameters representing the damage within time series, and the clustering approach identifies the outliers from the data signals as damaged members, while the deep learning approach uses the nonlinear data dependencies in SHM for the training model. The performance of these approaches in classifying the damaged cable was assessed, and the combinational identification method was obtained using the voting ensemble. Finally, the combination method was compared with an existing outlier detection algorithm, support vector machines (SVM). The results demonstrate that the proposed method is robust and provides higher accuracy for the damaged cable detection in the cable-stayed bridge.