Supervisory semiactive nonlinear control of a building-magnetorheological damper system

This paper proposes a supervisory semiactive nonlinear control of a building structure equipped with magnetorheological dampers. First, three sets of multi-input-single-output (MISO) linear controllers that are operated in local linear operating regions are designed such that the closed loop system is globally asymptotically stable and the performance on transient responses is also satisfied. Among them, two sets of the MISO linear controllers are blended into two lower level nonlinear controllers via a fuzzy interpolation method, while a set of the linear controllers are blended into a higher level nonlinear controller. Then, a supervisory semiactive nonlinear control system is developed through integration of the lower level nonlinear controllers with the high level controller. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, the performance of the proposed supervisory control approach is compared with that of a fully decentralized semiactive nonlinear controller; while uncontrolled responses are used as the baseline.