Structural health monitoring (SHM) is being widely used for the safety assessment and management of existing bridges and structures. One of the objectives related to SHM is to maximize the information gained from the structural testing, while keeping the number of sensors and consequently the cost of the sensor system to a minimum. The current work investigates four of the most influential optimal sensor placement (OSP) methods: the modal kinetic energy (MKE) method, the effective independence (EFI) method, the information entropy index (IEI) method and the MinMAC method. The methods were developed in MATLAB and used as input data the modal analysis results of a finite element model built in ANSYS of the Streicker Bridge, a pedestrian bridge located on the Princeton University Campus. The resulting sensor positions were estimated for a configuration with 14 sensors, and the four OSP methods were evaluated for different numbers of target sensors in terms of different OSP criteria: the determinant (DET) of the Fisher information matrix, the information entropy index (IEI) and the root mean square (RMS) of the off-diagonal entries of the MAC matrix. The study indicates that the EFI method should be chosen to estimate the optimal sensor positions as it provides the largest amount of information with a relatively low computation time.The authors are indebted to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for the funding provided through the research project BIA2017-86811-C2-1-R. All these projects are funded with FEDER funds. Authors are also indebted to the Secretaria d’ Universitats i Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya for the funding provided through Agaur (2017 SGR 1481).Postprint (author's final draft
