I-Corps: Artificial intelligence-based software package for end-to-end structural health monitoring of infrastructure systems

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of technology that uses the internet-of-things and/or fiber optic-based monitoring systems to solve problems faced by structural health monitoring companies related to data processing, interpretation, and storage. During its service life, civil infrastructure should satisfy the requirement of safety and sustainability for the designated operation.

However, due to natural disasters and extreme events (such as strong winds and earthquakes), structures degrade in performance over time, or they get damaged severely and even collapse. For example, America's Infrastructure received an overall grade of C- according to the American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card 2021, indicating that the nation's infrastructure is in mediocre condition, has deficiencies, and needs attention.

Structural health monitoring systems have gained rapid popularity in providing real-time information for the safety assessment of structures. However, structural health monitoring companies worldwide are facing challenges in data processing, interpretation, and storage, which limits their ability to obtain sufficiently comprehensive information about the health of infrastructure asset that is being monitored.

This I-Corps project is based on the development of smart and effective data processing, interpretation, and storage in the structural health monitoring systems using conventional artificial intelligence and computational intelligence. Conventional artificial intelligence in this technology will describe the problem and build logical reasoning using explicit rules.

Computational intelligence, which comprises an interconnected network of simple units, will be used to acquire information about the output from specific input data. The novelty of this innovation includes the development of a hybrid system by incorporating new techniques from both conventional artificial intelligence and computational intelligence to automatically accomplish the process of data acquisition and data analysis.

A provision of cloud services in the core technology is used to store data before and after analysis and evaluation for further processing. Finally, this technology will interpret analyzed data to detect and locate damages and make decisions on the deterioration level of an infrastructure asset. This will allow the system to determine the required actions before danger occurs.

This technology will provide an effective way for data processing, interpretation, and storage in monitoring systems in real-time by dividing the processes into three main components, namely checking for plausibility, short-term data analysis, and long-term data analysis.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.