Decentralized Overlapping Control for Civil Structures

This paper presents the problem of overlapping decentralized control design for a 20-story building benchmark which was proposed by the ASCE to the structural control community to compare different control design methods. The control design problem is focused on an in-plane (2-D) analysis and synthesis of one-half of the building structure. This naturally suggests the overlapping decomposition of a finite element overall dynamic model into two subsystems sharing a common parts. The lower substructure is composed of floors 1-12, while the upper substructure is composed of floors 8-20. The overlapping appears in the part of the columns between the 8th and the 12th floors. Fault-tolerance under selected failures of the overall decentralized controller are experimentally tested. The idea of decentralization of control has been numerically tested using a MATLAB/SIMULINK scheme and compared to the benchmark sample centralized control design using the linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) design. The performance of the overlapping decentralized control design has been assessed by means of given benchmark evaluation criteria, time responses and natural frequency analysis for both pre-earthquake and post-earthquake high-fidelity benchmark models. It is shown that the dynamics of closed-loop benchmark models with the proposed overlapping controller exhibits an acceptable behavior though slightly worse than in the centralized case.