On-Line Learning Failure-Tolerant Neural-Aided Controller for Earthquake Excited Structures

This paper presents an on-line learning failure-tolerant neural controller capable of controlling buildings subjected to severe earthquake ground motions. In the proposed scheme the neural controller aids a conventional H∞ controller designed to reduce the response of buildings under earthquake excitations. The conventional H∞ controller is designed to reduce the structural responses for a suite of severe earthquake excitations using specially designed frequency domain weighting filters. The neural controller uses a sequential learning radial basis function neural network architecture called extended minimal resource allocating network. The parameters of the neural network are adapted on-line with no off-line training. The performance of the proposed neural-aided controller is illustrated using simulation studies for a two degree of freedom structure equipped with one actuator on each floor. Results are presented for the cases of no failure and failure of the actuator on each of the two floors under several earthquake excitations. The study indicates that the performance of the proposed neural-aided controller is superior to that of the H∞ controller under no actuator failure conditions. In the presence of actuator failures, the performance of the primary H∞ controller degrades considerably, since actuator failures have not been considered for the design. Under these circumstances, the neural-aided controller is capable of controlling the acceleration and displacement structural responses. In many cases, using the neural-aided controller, the response magnitudes under failure conditions are comparable to the performance of the H∞ controller under no-failure conditions.