Optimal Placement of controllers for seismic Structures

The objective of this chapter is to evaluate different methodologies for the optimal placement and innovative design of passive energy dissipation systems which are being used to reduce vibrations of civil engineering structures subject to earthquakes. For large civil engineering structures it is necessary to install a sufficient number of dampers to achieve a reduction of the building response 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 which can be easily integrated in conventional design procedures used by practicing engineers dealing with damper-added structures, and they yield a solution which may be close to the optimal solution, but computationally expensive. Three different heuristic search strategies will be used to optimize four objective functions and results will be compared for three different building typologies.