Optimal Placement of Controller for Seismic Structures

Earthquakes pose a major threat to society and to the economic development of a nation. An earthquake disaster is generally associated with the collapse of building structures, but most severely with a large number of casualties and enormous economic losses. 

The dynamic response of civil engineering structures subjected to earthquake excitation can be reduced by using passive control systems such as energy dissipation devices (e.g. viscous dampers, etc.). The advantage of these systems with respect to active and semi-active control systems consist in the fact that they don t require any power supply, therefore are quite reliable and they require least maintenance. 

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For large civil engineering structures it is necessary to install a sufficient number of dampers to achieve a reduction of the stmctural response due to earthquake and the performance of these dampers depends on their location in the structures. The selection of few locations out of a large number of locations for the placement of passive dampers is typically a nonlinear constrained optimization problem. This problem can be solved either by simple heuristic search approaches or through integral optimization. The first ones are simple and they yield a solution which may be close to the optimal solution, but computationally expensive, instead the second ones are fast but solution is complex. 

In this chapter heuristic search methods have been investigated in detail using four different objective functions and applied to three building typologies that have been modeled as linear behavior for simplicity, however these methods can also be applied nonlinear structures. 

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