Active control of earthquake excited structures using fuzzy supervisory technique

A fuzzy supervisory technique for the active control of earthquake-excited building structures is studied in this paper. The method has a hierarchical structure, which consists of a supervisor at the higher level and several sub-controllers at the lower level. Each sub-controller is designed to reduce the story-drift of each floor by using an optimal control theory and a fuzzy logic is adopted to obtain a desirable supervisor. A fuzzy supervisor appropriately tunes the predesigned control gains at every moment by estimating the state of a structure through the fuzzy inference mechanism. The improved seismic control performance can be achieved by converting a simply designed static gain into a real-time variable dynamic gain through a fuzzy tuning process. Example designs and numerical simulations of an earthquake-excited three-story building are performed to prove the validity of the proposed control strategy.