An Autonomous Landslide Monitoring System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks

Landslides cause significant damages to civil infrastructure. Over the years, methods and technologies have been proposed to determine the risk of landslides and to detect hazardous slope movements. There have been increasing interests in developing and landslide monitoring systems to observe movements using sensors installed on the slope. Although providing accurate data, many landslide monitoring systems are not operating in an automated fashion and lack the ability to analyze the collected data in a timely manner. This paper presents an autonomous landslide monitoring system based on wireless sensor networks. Self-contained, autonomous software programs ("software agents") are embedded into the wireless sensor nodes. In cooperation with each other, the software agents are continuously collecting and analyzing sensor data, such as recorded ground acceleration and the orientations of the sensor nodes along the slope. If movements are observed, the collected data sets are automatically transmitted to a connected server system for further diagnoses. The landslide monitoring system presented in this paper is remotely accessible via Internet and provides real-time information about the current state of the monitored slope. Laboratory tests have been conducted to validate the reliability and the performance of the monitoring system.