Application of machine learning in optimized distribution of dampers for structural vibration control

This paper presents machine learning methods using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to analyze optimal damper distribution for structural vibration control. Regarding different building structures, a genetic algorithm based optimization method is used to determine optimal damper distributions that are further used as training samples. The structural features, the objective function, the number of dampers, etc. are used as input features, and the distribution of dampers is taken as an output result. In the case of a few number of damper distributions, multi-class prediction can be performed using SVM and MLP respectively. Moreover, MLP can be used for regression prediction in the case where the distribution scheme is uncountable. After suitable post-processing, good results can be obtained. Numerical results show that the proposed method can obtain the optimized damper distributions for different structures under different objective functions, which achieves better control effect than the traditional uniform distribution and greatly improves the optimization efficiency.