The problem of optimal placement of active members which are used 101 vibration control in adaptive truss structures is investigated. The control scheme is based on the method of eigenvalue assignment as a means of shaping the transient response of the controlled adaptive structures, and the minimization of required control action is considered as the optimization criterion. To this end, a performance index which measures the control strokes of active members is formulated in an efficient way. in order to reduce the computation burden, particularly for the case where t h e locations of active members have lo be selected from a large set of available sites, several heuristic searching schemes are proposed for obtaining the near-optimal locations. T h e proposed schemes significantly reduce t h e computational complexity of placing multiple active members to the order of that when a single active member is placed.