While considerable effort has been and continues to be invested in the development of sensor technologies and signal processing algorithms for structural health monitoring, much less effort has been made in the area of how these systems should be configured in terms of how many and what type of sensors are required in order to achieve desired levels of system performance. In general, using as few sensors as possible is desirable, but care must be taken that they are located in positions that provide adequate coverage for detection of undesirable structural changes. This presentation will present a formal design strategy that uses engineering design optimization algorithms and the system theory principles of controllability and observability and finite element models of the structure in question to obtain optimal to obtain an optimal sensor configuration. The presentation will include analysis of the performance of a design produced by this algorithm when applied to a complex three dimensional geometry that undergoes simulated structural changes.