Monitoring large-scale civil engineering structures such as offshore platforms and high-large buildings requires a large number of sensors of different types. Innovative sensor data information technologies are very extremely important for data transmission, storage and retrieval of large volume sensor data generated from large sensor networks. How to obtain the optimal sensor set and placement is more and more concerned by researchers in vibration-based SHM. In this paper, a method of determining the sensor location which aims to extract the dynamic parameter effectively is presented. The method selects the number and place of sensor being installed on or in structure by through the tolerance domain statistical inference algorithm combined with second order sensitivity technology. The method proposal first finds and determines the sub-set sensors from the theoretic measure point derived from analytical model by the statistical tolerance domain procedure under the principle of modal effective independence. The second step is to judge whether the sorted out measured point set has sensitive to the dynamic change of structure by utilizing second order characteristic value sensitivity analysis. A 76-high-building benchmark mode and an offshore platform structure sensor optimal selection are demonstrated and result shows that the method is available and feasible.