Copyright © 2012 Francisco Palacios-Quiñonero et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In this paper, a computationally effective strategy to obtain multioverlapping controllers via the Inclusion Principle is applied to design discrete-time state-feedback multioverlapping LQR controllers for seismic protection of tall buildings. To compute the corresponding control actions, the proposed semidecentralized controllers only require state information from neighboring stories. This particular configuration of information exchange allows introducing a dramatic reduction in the transmission range required for a wireless implementation of the communication system. To investigate the behavior of the proposed semidecentralized multioverlapping controllers, a proper simulation model has been designed. This model includes semiactive actuation devices with limited force capacity, control sampling times consistent with the communication latency, time-delayed state information, and communication failures. The performance of the proposed multioverlapping controllers has been assessed through numerical simulations of the seismic response of a 20-story building with positive results.