New Control Strategy for Economic Driving of Railway Vehicles

A new control strategy for railway vehicles, which fulfilling constraints on velocity, journey time and driving style is proposed. More specifically, the train dynamics are modeled discretely, switched and nonlinear, while the optimization variable is the handle position which modulates the available traction/braking force and belong to a set ofdiscrete values and/or operating modes, which the human driver is able to implement. Hence the aim is to choose the optimal handle position that minimizes the cost, isimplementable by the driver and also fulfills the eco-driving objective, such that the driving style is constrained by predefined driving sequences. A supervisor detects thestates of the trainband subsequently modifies the weights of the cost by negotiating between constraint satisfaction and control aggressiveness, in order to share the available regenerated braking energy among the connected trains in a substation network. The efficiency of the proposed switched NMPC strategy is demonstrated using realistic simulation case study.

Keywords:

Train control , Nonlinear control systems , Switching algorithms