Optimal Placement of Wireless Sensor Nodes for Bridge Dynamic Monitoring Based on Improved Particle Swarm Algorithm

The issue of optimal placement of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the major challenges for dynamic monitoring of bridges. It should be solved based on combining the effective monitoring of the dynamic performance of a bridge with the energy consumption of WSNs. Thus, the relationship between the bridge modal and the energy consumption of wireless networks is derived. Optimizing sensor location is achieved by using the improved wavelet particle swarm algorithm, which overcomes the disadvantage of the conventional particle swarm algorithm by applying mutation operator to the selected particles with certain small probability. Based on the comparison between the ANSYS simulation results and the measured bridge data, as well as the energy distribution diagram of WSNs, the proposed method is shown to reflect the dynamic performance of the test bridge well. Moreover, the method effectively controls the energy consumption of WSNs and achieves reasonable optimization effects. Therefore, this method can be used for dynamic monitoring of wireless sensors in various bridge types.