Advanced design of integrated vibration control systems for adjacent buildings under seismic excitations

In vibration control of adjacent buildings under seismic excitations, a twofold objective has to be considered:(i) to mitigate the vibrational response of the individual structures and (ii) to provide a suitable protection against interbuilding impacts (pounding). An interesting strategy to deal with this complex control problem consists in considering an integrated control system, which combines interbuilding actuation devices with local control systems implemented in the individual buildings. In this paper, an effective computational strategy to design this kind of integrated control systems is presented. The proposed design methodology is based on a linear matrix inequality formulation, allows including active and passive actuation devices, and makes it possible to deal with important information constraints associated to the problem. The main ideas are illustrated by means of a two-building system equipped with three actuation devices: two interstory actuation devices implemented at the ground level of the buildings, plus an interbuilding actuation device installed at the top level of the lowest building. For this control setup, two different integrated controllers are designed. A proper set of numerical simulations is conducted to assess the performance of the proposed controllers with positive results.