Active-passive control strategy for adjacent buildings

Author's version of a chapter in the book: 2011 Proceedings of the American Control Conference. Also available from the publisher at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=05991059In this paper, a control strategy to mitigate the vibrational response of adjacent buildings under seismic excitation is presented. The proposed strategy combines inter-building passive actuators with active actuators placed in the building stories. The main ideas are presented by means of a simplified two-building model; however, a semi-decentralized overlapping approach via the inclusion principle has been used to impose a proper information exchange structure suitable for wireless control of large buildings. Numerical simulations have been carried out to assess the performance of the proposed methodology with promising results. The overall control system exhibits some degree of fault-tolerance since only partial degradation of the control performance results from partial failures of the control system