Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mathematical Problems in Engineering Volume 2012, Article ID 942910, 23 pages doi:10.1155/2012/942910 Research Article Structural Vibration Control for a Class of Connected Multistructure Mechanical Systems Francisco Palacios-Qui ˜ nonero, 1 Josep M. Rossell, 1 Josep Rubi ´ o-Masseg ´ u, 1 and Hamid R. Karimi 2 1 Departament de Matem` atica Aplicada III, Universitat Polit` ecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Av. Bases de Manresa 61-73, Manresa 08242, Barcelona, Spain 2 Department of Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Science, University of Agder (UiA), 4898 Grimstad, Norway Correspondence should be addressed to Francisco Palacios-Qui ˜ nonero, francisco.palacios@upc.edu Received 16 June 2012; Accepted 8 August 2012 Academic Editor: Zidong Wang Copyright q 2012 Francisco Palacios-Qui ˜ nonero et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. A mathematical model to compute the overall vibrational response of connected multistructure mechanical systems is presented. Using the proposed model, structural vibration control strategies for seismic protection of multibuilding systems can be efficiently designed. Particular attention is paid to the design of control configurations that combine passive interbuilding dampers with local feedback control systems implemented in the buildings. These hybrid active-passive con- trol strategies possess the good properties of passive control systems and also have the high- performance characteristics of active control systems. Moreover, active-passive control configu- rations can be properly designed for multibuilding systems requiring different levels of seismic protection and are also remarkably robust against failures in the local feedback control systems. The application of the main ideas is illustrated by means of a three-building system, and numerical simulations are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed structural vibration control strategies. 1. Introduction Over the last years, seismic protection of adjacent buildings has been attracting an increasing interest. For this kind of systems, the action of seismic excitations can produce interbuilding collisions pounding, which can cause severe damage to the buildings structure and contents 1–5. Consequently, structural vibration control SVC strategies for multibuilding systems must aim at mitigating not only the vibrational response of individual buildings, but also the negative interbuilding interactions.