Structural health monitoring (SHM) implies the integration of nondestructive evaluation methods within a system to enable autonomous state awareness for structural integrity. SHM systems have been optimized to cover wide areas as well as focus on specific “hot-spots” for both metallic and composite structures. They can be configured to monitor adverse “changes” such as fatigue cracks, corrosion, delamination, loose bolts, or impact damage either in real time or on-demand. Immediate benefits of SHM include drastically reducing inspection costs, minimizing preventative maintenance, increasing asset availability, and extending remaining useful life of structures. Future benefits could include using SHM data to improve design-margin efficiency for lighter-weight structures, facilitating structural certification and/or quality assurance, and dynamically controlling operating envelopes.

Over the past few years, there has been rapid development on SHM technique; many smart sensors and intelligent algorithms have been developed. Advances in sensing technologies have also enabled the use of large numbers of sensors for health monitoring of civil infrastructures. The sensors utilized in a SHM system are required to monitor not only the structural status including stress, displacement, and acceleration, but also those influential environmental parameters, such as wind speed, temperature, and the quality of its foundation. Since a large-scale sensor network needs to be involved in a SHM system, how to deploy it in a complicated, spatially extended structure and the resulting best identification of structural characteristics by the data acquired from those locations will be challenging tasks.

Therefore, in the light of the above considerations, we invite investigators to contribute original research papers as well as review papers for this special issue that aim at becoming an international forum for researchers and practitioners to summarize the most recent advances, progress, and ideas in the field of distributed sensor networks for SHM and its application.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Smart, bioinspired, nanometer, wireless, remote sensing technology, and so forth
• Placement algorithms and evaluation criteria in design of sensor networks
• Uncertainty, sensitivity, reliability, and redundancy in vibration monitoring
• Vibration data cleaning, compression, mining, and fusing technology
• Application of large-scale sensor networks for civil infrastructures
• Other related aspects