Feedback Control in a Distributed Intelligent Multi-Purpose Sensor Network

The concept of smart aggregates, a distributed intelligent multi-purpose sensor network (DIMSN) for civil structures, has been developed to address three important issues including early-age concrete strength monitoring, impact detection and evaluation, and structural health monitoring. This paper mainly discusses employing smart aggregates' active sensing property to form feedback in the DIMSN to reduce damage-location detecting times for fast time-response and low power-cost. This is an optimal decision-making subject and we present concept of the Geometry Structure matching method (GSM) with the Expert System theory (ES) to build the decision-making module. The designed controller is evaluated on a 2-story concrete frame model instrumented with the DIMSN as a testing object by means of MATLAB simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed method has performed successfully in selecting an actuator in the DIMSN for detecting damage location.