The success of virtually all structural health monitoring (SHM) methods depends on the information content of the measurements, and thus on the placement of the available sensors. This paper presents an efficient method for finding optimal sensor distribution over structural system with many degrees of freedom (DOFs). The objective function is based on the classical Fisher information matrix. Originally, this yields a computationally hard discrete optimization problem. However, the proposed numerical solution method is based on a concept taken from structural topology optimization, where a discrete optimization problem is replaced with a continuous one. Two numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. These are a 5-bay truss with 24 DOFs and a two-story frame structure whose finite element model has been condensed to 14 DOFs.
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