Decentralized control design for a cable-stayed bridge benchmark

The objective of this investigation is to present a decentralized control design for a cable-stayed bridge benchmark which was recently proposed within the structural control community to design and compare control schemes. The cable-stayed bridge has two towers as main structural elements. This naturally suggests the decomposition of a finite element overall dynamic model into two disjoint subsystems by assuming that the overall dynamics is determined mainly by the behavior of the subsystems and that interconnections have only a small dynamic effect. The idea of decentralization of control has been numerically tested using a SIMULINK scheme and compared to the benchmark sample centralized control design using the LQG design. The performance of the decentralized control design has been assessed by means of given benchmark evaluation criteria, eigenvalue analysis and time responses. The dynamics of the closed-loop benchmark model with the local controllers exhibits an acceptable behaviour though slightly worse than in the centralized case.