Data Mining Aspects of a Dam Monitoring Project

Summary

When creating computational models of engineering structures, it can be very helpful to have insights into the behavior and composition of the physical system. Such insights can be gleaned using data mining techniques, where often unexpected relationships between physical quantities can be made evident.

In the context of an agent-based research project to monitor dams, a number of sensors supply a large amount of data over an extended period of time. This data can naturally be used for data mining purposes to discover new and interesting aspects about the engineering structure. In this paper, an open source data mining tool (Weka) is briefly introduced and presented to show how data mining techniques can be applied in the handling of engineering tasks.