A New Decentralized Control Approach with Application to the ASCE Benchmark Control Problem under Earthquake Excitation

In this paper, a new decentralized control approach is proposed based on an instantaneous optimal control scheme. Interactions between adjacent substructures are considered as the unknown general inputs to the substructure concerned. A computational algorithm based on the Kalman extended estimator is proposed to estimate the state and the unknown general inputs in each substructure for both cases that measurements at all the DOFs at the substructure interfaces are available or not available. The proposed decentralized control is applied to the 20-story control benchmark structure under earthquake excitation. Numerical results validate that the proposed decentralized control provides satisfactory control performance when comparing with the conventional centralized control algorithm. Robustness of the proposed decentralized control is also studied. The proposed decentralized control approach is viable for structural control of large-scale structures.