Intelligent logging strategies for civil engineering applications

In many engineering disciplines, it is the practice to monitor performance of prototypes to validate design assumptions and to check compliance with a specification. Despite the obvious importance of such monitoring, it is relatively rarely undertaken in civil engineering constructions. While this may be due partly to the uniqueness of much civil engineering construction it is also due to the technical difficulties inherent in trying to monitor events which occur infrequently and unpredictably. The purpose of this paper is to describe how computer-based techniques can be used to facilitate data gathering from, and analysis and interpretation of, performance of civil engineering constructions in service.