Sensing solutions for assessing and monitoring seismically-excited buildings

Several sensing solution systems for assessing and monitoring seismically-excited buildings are reviewed. Although the importance of monitoring buildings has been widely recognized following the devastating earthquake of magnitude 9 in east Japan in 2011, the installation of a structural health monitoring system in a building is still expensive, limiting the use of such systems to tall, or otherwise important, buildings. Using sensors only for earthquakes may not be practicable for normal buildings. As a potential solution for this difficulty, a system using sensor agent robots is introduced.