A smart monitoring approach based on decentralized digital twins
Digital twinning approaches in structural health monitoring (SHM) are applied in conventional cable-based SHM systems, relying on the collocation of sensor data and physics-based models on a single server (“single source of truth”). This “centralized” digital twinning rationale increases the risk of data loss in the event of server malfunctions, thus converting the single source of truth into a “single point of failure”. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a decentralized digital twinning approach for SHM. Building upon advances in wireless “smart” SHM, we propose distributing physics-based models into processing units of wireless sensor nodes, thus transferring large parts of SHM tasks to the sensor nodes, which collaboratively analyze the structural behavior via limited wireless communication. The relative independence of wireless sensor nodes grants SHM systems redundancy, which enhances the robustness of digital twins.
(März 2024)