Spatial-Temporal Features Based Sensor Network Partition in Dam Safety Monitoring System

Many various types of sensors have been installed to monitor the deformation and stress in the dam structure. It is difficult to directly evaluate the operation status of the dam structure based on the massive monitoring data. The sensor network is divided into multiple regions according to the design specifications, simulation data, and engineering experiences. The local results from sub-regions are integrated to achieve overall evaluation. However, it ignores the spatial distribution of sensors and the variation of time series, which cannot meet the real-time evaluation for the dam safety monitoring. If the network partitions can provide the preliminary foundation for analyzing the dynamic change laws of the dam’s working conditions in a real-way, we should consider the similarity of structure and stresses in the local region of the dam and the correlation among the monitoring data. A time-series denoising autoencoder (TSDA) is proposed to represent the spatial and temporal features of the nodes by compressing high-dimensional monitoring data. Then, a network partitioning algorithm (NPA) based on spatial-temporal features based on the TSDA is presented. The NPA ensures that the partition results can support the analysis of the physical change laws by introducing the auxiliary objective variable to optimize the network partition objective function. Experimental results on the public datasets and a real dataset from an arch dam demonstrate that the proposed network partition algorithm NPA can achieve better partition performance than TSDA+K-Means and TSDA+GMM. The NPA can improve the silhouette coefficient by 45.1% and 58.4% higher than the TSDA+K-Means and TSDA+GMM, respectively. The NPA can increase the Calinski-Harabaz Index by 30.8% and 61.6%, respectively.