Reliability of Decentralized Energy Market-based Structural Control

Widespread adoption of structural control systems has been limited by the perception that systems might prove to be unreliable over their operational life spans. To address this concern, a novel decentralized control implementation that is responsive to actuation failures is proposed. Termed energy market-based control (EMBC), a control system is modeled as a free market economy where actuators act as market buyers and system energy supplies are modeled as market sellers. At every time step, each market participant simultaneously optimizes their respective utility functions resulting in a Pareto optimal control solution. As a piece-wise approximation of a dynamic optimization control solution, such as centralized linear quadratic regulation (LQR), energy market-based control is responsive to changes in the underlying system including possible failures in the initial actuation configuration. To illustrate the robustness of the EMBC control solution to actuation failures, a 20-story benchmark structure controlled by semi-active variable dampers is selected. Using cost functions as measures of optimality, changes in cost function final values are tracked during scenarios of failed actuation configurations for both an LQR and EMBC controller. Based on cost function changes, the EMBC control solution is shown to be responsive to failed actuators resulting in greater solution reliability.