Cyber-Physical System for Bridge Lifecycle Monitoring

The goal of this research project is to develop a scalable cyber-physical system (CPS) framework for the integration of physical and computational systems for bridge lifecycle monitoring. Bridge monitoring involves several independent but isolated components. Sharing of information and software modules across different systems is limited. Information sharing and system integration would facilitate meaningful use of data, thereby enhancing bridge operation and maintenance and public safety. This project focuses on the development of a scalable cloud-based cyberinfrastructure platform for managing, sharing and utilizing sensor data and bridge information. The cloud-based platform comprises of virtual machines, distributed database and web servers. Distributed database built on a peer-to-peer architecture enables scalable and fault- tolerant data management on a cloud computing environment. Platform-neutral web services are designed in compliant with the Representational State Transfer (REST) design, and enable access to the cloud resources via a standard web protocol. For data interoperability, a bridge information modeling (BrIM) schema for bridge monitoring applications is defined.
Furthermore, CPS applications, including data-driven sensor data reconstruction module, data integration module, and web/mobile user interfaces, are developed to facilitate the utilization of bridge monitoring data.