Although a lot of different types of sensors are available in the market only a limited number of sensors can be installed on a structure. Proper placement of these sensors plays a vital role in effectively achieving the objectives of a monitoring system. Sensor placement becomes especially critical in the case of bridges where the applied loading keeps on changing its location. A sensor layout that provides good quality structural response estimates for a given applied loading may not yield acceptable results for a different loading arrangement. Further, usually different types of sensors are installed on a structure e.g. strain gauges and accelerometers. These sensors measure different physical quantities having different units and orders of magnitude thus cannot be easily incorporated in a sensor placement optimization (SPO) process. So, this research work proposes a multi-objective sensor placement optimization approach that can effectively deal with different types of sensor measurements and spatially varying loading such as in the case of bridges. The proposed method employs an augmented Kalman filter (AKF) for structural response estimation and a multi-objective genetic algorithm for SPO. The AKF can effectively estimate structural response using a few heterogeneous noisy measurements while incorporating the modeling error. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using a numerical example of a 3D truss bridge structure. The results show that the proposed multi-objective optimization method yields a sensor arrangement that remains effective against spatially varying dynamic loading.

尽管市场上有许多不同类型的传感器，但只能在结构上安装有限数量的传感器。这些传感器的正确放置在有效实现监视系统目标方面起着至关重要的作用。在桥梁上，施加的载荷不断改变其位置时，传感器的放置变得尤为重要。对于给定的施加载荷，提供高质量结构响应估计的传感器布局，对于不同的载荷布置可能无法产生可接受的结果。此外，通常在诸如应变仪和加速度计的结构上安装不同类型的传感器。这些传感器测量具有不同单位和数量级的不同物理量，因此无法轻松地合并到传感器放置优化（SPO）过程中。所以，这项研究工作提出了一种多目标传感器放置优化方法，该方法可以有效处理不同类型的传感器测量值和空间变化的负载（例如桥梁）。所提出的方法采用增强卡尔曼滤波器（AKF）进行结构响应估计，并采用多目标遗传算法进行SPO。AKF可以使用一些异类噪声测量有效地估算结构响应，同时纳入建模误差。使用3D桁架桥结构的数值示例证明了该方法的有效性。结果表明，所提出的多目标优化方法产生的传感器布置在抵抗空间变化的动态载荷方面仍然有效。