International Research Projects on Structural Health Monitoring: An Overview

Significant research efforts are presently spent to the problems of health monitoring and damage detection. This paper approaches the subject from the point of view of the organisation of the research. More specifically, it reviews the main international research programs and activities, which are devoted to this topic. Related to this are the questions of the user needs and the deployment of the research results: assuming valid research results are obtained, in what form should these results be deployed to address the user needs. While the focus is on EU-cooperative research, the main US and Far-East activities are briefly discussed as well.