Optimal sensor placement for state estimation of flexible shell structures

This paper presents a method for optimal sensor placement for flexible shell structures. The optimization objectives are the number of sensors, as a surrogate for implementation cost, and an observability measure. The latter is derived from the observability gramian and considers observation energy of the least observable state. The methodology is tested on a flexible thin-shell structure that is modeled using Finite Element methods. The equations of motion are transformed into modal space and model reduction methods are applied. The resulting model is used for the optimization of the sensor locations. The optimization is performed by the Multi-objective Simulated Annealing algorithm that uses a dominance-based energy formulation for the comparison of different optimal solution candidates.