A damper placement problem for a large flexible space truss structure is formulated as a noxious facility location problem. The objective is to determine the p truss members of the structure to replace with active dampers so that the modal damping ratio is as large as possible for all significant modes of vibration. Equivalently, given a strain energy matrix with rows indexed on the modes (customers) and the columns indexed on the truss members (potential facility locations), the authors seek to find a set of p columns such that the smallest row sum, over the p columns, is maximized. They develop a tabu search heuristic for the damper placement problem for a particular truss structure with 34 significant modes and over 600 truss members. The resulting solutions are shown to be of high quality.
