From SHINDEV’s professional perspective, electrical cable failures have become one of the leading causes of fire incidents in China. According to data released by the National Fire and Rescue Administration, more than 30% of fires recorded between January and October 2023 were caused by electrical faults, resulting in direct economic losses exceeding RMB 26.3 billion. Against this backdrop, traditional operation and maintenance models that rely heavily on manual inspections and point-based sensors are no longer sufficient to support the safety management of today’s large-scale, long-distance, and high-density infrastructure systems.
SHINDEV believes that fiber-optic sensing technologies are evolving from auxiliary monitoring tools into foundational sensing infrastructure for safe operations. With advantages such as continuous monitoring, long-range coverage, strong immunity to electromagnetic interference, and high reliability, fiber-optic sensing has been widely adopted across optical cable maintenance, oil and gas pipelines, power grids, public transportation, perimeter security, and geological hazard early-warning systems, becoming a critical technological pathway for mitigating systemic safety risks.
In addition to electrical fire risks, the rapid expansion of optical cable deployment density, along with the growing scale of oil, gas, and power networks, has significantly increased operational complexity. In practice, challenges such as heavy monitoring workloads, inaccurate fault localization, and insufficient real-time performance tracking remain widespread. Industry statistics indicate that over 85% of network and power outages are caused by cable failures, leading to substantial social and economic losses.
According to SHINDEV, the root cause lies in the fact that traditional monitoring systems are primarily reactive, lacking continuous perception and early-warning capabilities. Such systems are increasingly misaligned with modern infrastructure’s demands for real-time responsiveness, system-level visibility, and high reliability.
Fiber-optic sensing uses light as the information carrier and optical fiber as both the transmission and sensing medium, enabling real-time monitoring of temperature, strain, vibration, acoustic signals, and other physical parameters through optical signal analysis. Compared with conventional electromagnetic sensors, fiber-optic sensing offers superior performance in corrosion resistance, electromagnetic immunity, long-distance monitoring, data capacity, and environmental adaptability, making it particularly suitable for long-term deployment in harsh environments.
After years of technological development, fiber-optic sensing has achieved large-scale applications in power, oil and gas, transportation, chemical industries, security, and geological monitoring, gradually establishing an operational paradigm of “passive inspection → active perception → intelligent early warning.”
In real-world deployments, fiber-optic sensing technologies have demonstrated strong adaptability across multiple scenarios:
Optical cable operations and maintenance, enabling integrated monitoring of physical routes and service paths;
Oil and gas pipeline monitoring, achieving long-distance, high-resolution safety surveillance;
Power transmission line monitoring, providing real-time detection of icing, vibration, and thermal anomalies;
Geological and fire early warning, supporting large-scale environmental sensing networks;
Perimeter security and subsea cable monitoring, ensuring continuous protection of critical assets.
Existing fiber-optic sensing solutions typically fall into point-based, quasi-distributed, and fully distributed categories. While fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors excel in precision and stability, and distributed sensing offers long-range, blind-spot-free coverage, SHINDEV notes that traditional architectures struggle to simultaneously meet the emerging requirements for high capacity, high accuracy, high density, long distance, and high reliability.
This challenge has accelerated interest in next-generation fiber-optic sensing networks based on grating arrays.
Next-generation fiber grating array sensing technologies integrate online grating inscription during fiber drawing with hybrid wavelength-division and time-division multiplexing, enabling efficient demodulation of massive sensing signals. This approach effectively combines the strengths of FBG-based sensing and distributed sensing, paving the way for truly scalable, high-performance sensing networks.
SHINDEV observes that several domestic enterprises have already begun deploying such solutions, demonstrating early engineering feasibility and offering a practical pathway toward intelligent perception systems for large-scale infrastructure.
According to Frost & Sullivan, China’s fiber-optic sensing solutions market reached approximately RMB 7.29 billion in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 27.1% since 2017. Investments in power grid infrastructure, urban utility tunnels, energy pipelines, and subsea cables remain key growth drivers. The market is projected to reach RMB 20.87 billion by 2026, reflecting strong long-term growth momentum.
SHINDEV concludes that as infrastructure systems become increasingly large-scale and complex, operational safety is shifting from reliance on human experience toward system-level perception. Next-generation fiber-optic sensing technologies—particularly fiber grating array solutions—are poised to become foundational elements across power, transportation, energy, and urban safety domains.
As these technologies mature and deployment scenarios expand, fiber-optic sensing is expected to increasingly complement or even replace traditional electromagnetic sensors, playing a pivotal role in next-generation IoT ecosystems and smart infrastructure development.
