BIONIB: Blockchain-Based IoT Using Novelty Index in Bridge Health Monitoring

Bridge health monitoring is critical for infrastructure safety, especially with the growing deployment of IoT sensors. This work addresses the challenge of securely storing large volumes of sensor data and extracting actionable insights for timely damage detection. We propose BIONIB, a novel framework that combines an unsupervised machine learning approach called the Novelty Index (NI) with a scalable blockchain platform (EOSIO) for secure, real-time monitoring of bridges. BIONIB leverages EOSIO’s smart contracts for efficient, programmable, and secure data management across distributed sensor nodes. Experiments on real-world bridge sensor data under varying loads, climatic conditions, and health states demonstrate BIONIB’s practical effectiveness. Key findings include CPU utilization below 40% across scenarios, a twofold increase in storage efficiency, and acceptable latency degradation, which is not critical in this domain. Our comparative analysis suggests that BIONIB fills a unique niche by coupling NI-based detection with a decentralized architecture, offering real-time alerts and transparent, verifiable records across sensor nodes.