On evaluating monitoring design effectiveness

When designing a structure such as a bridge or a building, a civil engineer follows a well-established, rational procedure, whereby the performance of the design concept is predicted through structural analysis and quantitatively assessed with respect to the target performance. On the contrary, when an engineer designs a monitoring system, the approach is often heuristic with performance evaluation based on common sense or experience, rather than on quantitative analysis. In this paper, we describe a rational procedure for the design of monitoring systems, keeping in mind an analogy between structural and monitoring design. Whereas the structural design objective is to achieve stability with an appropriate level of safety, the object of monitoring is to acquire knowledge with an appropriate level of confidence. Herein, we illustrate the motoring design procedure with a simple practical example and discuss a possible metric for evaluating the performance of a design concept.