Facilitating the monitoring and management of structural health in civil infrastructures with an Edge/Fog/Cloud architecture

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is nowadays a requirement for civil infrastructures like tunnels, bridges and viaducts. With the advances provided by the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years in areas such as wireless communications, miniaturisation and application protocols, this paradigm is spreading to the wider society to ensure appropriate protection of critical infrastructures. Both fog and edge computing have also strongly contributed to SHM and the IoT by bringing computing as close as possible to where data is produced, thereby reducing the latency response with respect to traditional cloud integrations. In this paper, an Edge/Fog/Cloud architecture for SHM in civil infrastructures is presented. The main goal of this architecture is to create and provide a flexible framework involving all the required components for the management, monitoring and deployment of SHM solutions, enabling high availability and easy distribution of the components over the architecture. The architecture has been evaluated as an alternative to the real deployment in a tunnel of a cloud architecture showing the benefits of adopting an Edge/Fog/Cloud hierarchy.