16 December 2020
What is the value of SHM?
A talk given to the Australian Network of Structural Health Monitoring (ANSHM) in the 11th Annual Workshop on 8 December 2020. Abstract: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is intuitively known to be a good thing and widely accepted as such. The collection of data from a structure clearly gives its owner or engineer more information on which to base objective and rational decisions. However, there exists a major hurdle to the more widespread adoption of SHM amongst asset owners. SHM systems and installations have clearly defined capital and maintenance costs. In contrast, the benefits that SHM bring, cannot be so clearly expressed in financial terms. As a result, the financial benefits of SHM do not appear in Cost-Benefit Analyses, while the costs do so. On paper then, SHM appears as a cost to decision-makers, and this inhibits adoption. While it is reasonable to argue that SHM could be thought of as an insurance policy, this does not give decision-makers a financial basis for approving SHM. This presentation will address this fundamental problem facing SHM adoption. We will explain the new field of Value of Information of SHM which aims to quantify the financial benefit that SHM offers. The approach involves decision trees, and Bayesian pre-posterior analyses. These will be explained using a practical example of bridge assessment and monitoring. This talk is partly based on the paper: Khan, M.S., Caprani, C.C., Ghosh, S., Ghosh, J. (2020), ‘Value of strain-based structural health monitoring as decision support for heavy load access to bridges’, Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, in press, accepted 5 November.