Quality of Hybrid Simulation: A Reachability Analysis Approach

We address the issue of the quality of hybrid simulation, an experimental method used in earthquake engineering to examine the response of structural systems to dynamic excitation. After describing the typical sources and the effects of measurement and actuation errors, we present a reachability-based formulation of error propagation in hybrid simulation. This approach predicts possible (sets of) states of a structural system under dynamic loading for all (sets of) perturbations acting on the system. We compute ellipsoidal approximations of these sets. Finally, we demonstrate the reachability analysis approach on a few canonical dynamic problems.