Novel results on decentralized H-infinity controller design for structural vibration control of large buildings

In this paper, we present a novel control design methodology for structural vibration control of large buildings. The main idea consists in decomposing the overall building system into decoupled single-story subsystems and modeling the subsystem interactions as external disturbances. Then, a complete set of local decentralized controllers can be efficiently computed using the existing LMI solvers. In the proposed approach, two different levels of decentralization can be distinguished: decentralized design and decentralized implementation, which are both of critical importance in large-scale control problems. From the design point of view, the local controllers are independently synthesized using only the low-dimensional subsystem models. The implementation phase is through the overall decentralized controller defined by the set of local controllers, which can drive the actuation devices using only local state-feedback information. To illustrate the proposed methodology, decentralized H8 controllers are designed for the seismic protection of a five-story building and a twenty-story building. A proper set of numerical simulations is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed decentralized controllers and the computation times are considered to assess the computational effectiveness of the decentralized design methodology.