Research on distributed monitoring system of intelligent highway based on weak fiber Bragg grating

• Proposed a distributed monitoring system for intelligent highways using wFBG sensing technology. • Designed and validated novel wFBG-based strained and vibrating optical fiber cables. • Demonstrated real-time highway safety and traffic monitoring through experiments and simulations. • Achieved full-domain and multi-parameter monitoring, including strain, vibration, and traffic flow. • Addressed challenges of temperature compensation and deployment in operational highways. The intelligent highway distributed monitoring system employing wFBG sensing technology is promising in the transport engineering. This research proposes a system architecture consisting of weak fiber Bragg grating (wFBG), data link, edge computing region and client interface. The structure and demodulation of the strained optical fiber cable and vibrating optical fiber cable based on wFBG were developed and applied. Further, taking Chen-Bridge and the nearby roadway as the research object, the performance of two types of sensing optical cables was verified according to dynamic and static loading experiments as well as finite element analysis. Moreover, the implementation solutions for intelligent highway functions such as bridge safety status, roadway safety status, lane identification, traffic volume statistics with speed calculation are proposed. Finally, the improvement directions of wFBG applications are analyzed.