Investigating the Benefit-Cost of MEMS Application for Structural Health Monitoring of Transportation Infrastructure

In recent years MEMS has been widely recognized as an effective device for structural health monitoring of transportation structures, such as bridges and tunnels. It is unclear, however, whether the benefits of MEMS application far outweigh the associated cost. A quantitative approach for benefit and cost calculation of MEMS application for structural health monitoring of transportation infrastructure will be a major step forward to provide guidance to potential MEMS users. In this paper, we develop a fuzzy logic-based approach (since MEMS benefits are generally fuzzy in nature and at best, they can be quantified using fuzzy-logic) for benefit-cost calculation associated with MEMS application. Real-world case studies will be presented in future works using the proposed fuzzylogic approach.