Smart sensor research at the French Laboratoire Central des Ponts et Chaussées

Highlights two works being carried out by the French Laboratoire Central des Ponts et Chaussées in the field of smart sensors. The first concerns the knowledge of loads applied to bridges in order to evaluate extreme load effects and fatigue load effects over their lifetime. To achieve these goals, a data acquisition system based on smart sensors extracting and classifying extrema in the traffic loads signal has been developed. The second concerns distributed systems software cost reduction by means of a generic model. The aim of the model is the design of a software generator for smart sensor‐based systems. The key of the system is in the description of an instrumentation plan under the form of a data dependence graph (DDG). The goal of the generator is to map and “execute” that DDG on the physical architecture according to the number of transducers, their affectation to the smart sensors and a PC‐based system controller.