Integrated systems for Structural Health Monitoring: worldwide applications and perspectives

Seismic protection of strategic or historical structures is an relevant challenge today: large parts of European area, in fact, are exposed to medium to high seismic risk. This is the reason why seismic protection, either active or passive in nature, can be pursued using advanced technologies. Monitoring of in place performances of structures can play a relevant role in the development of tools and methods to assess and forecast structural response of critical constructions. An effective Structural Health Monitoring system is based on integration of several types of sensors in a modular architecture. Moreover, the advances in the field of Information Technology and communications assure data transmission also in critical conditions. It is worth noting that availability of procedures able to reduce transmission data volumes is a key aspect for reliability and sustainability of infrastructure, in particular when several constructions are monitored at the same time and supervised by a single network control centre. In this paper, after a review of sample cases worldwide, some aspects related to the implementation of an integrated SHM system covering several structures on a wide territory is analyzed in detail.