Research on the stability of virtual coupling train formation based on a PID controller under the influence of time delay

As the latest research direction of train-to-train communication,virtual coupling train formation technology has attracted the attention of many scholars.This paper studies the influence of time delay on the formation of virtual coupled trains.We proposed a distributed PID controller,which means that trains can still form a stable fleet operation under the influence of communication delay and control delay.After modelling and analysis,the research uses Matlab to conduct simulation,involving two sets of experiments.Factors including speed,acceleration,position,position error,expected distance between adjacent trains and actual distance between adjacent trains are simulated.The results demonstrate that the distributed PID controller can effectively control the impact of time delay on the virtual coupling fleet.

Research on virtual coupling technology in rail transit train collision protection

In the research on the new generation of intelligent rail transit system,the prevention of train collision accidents is still a focus.Virtual coupling technology controls the running speed and interval distance of two or more trains cooperatively through Trainto-Train(T2T)direct communication technology.The aim is to form a coordinated logical system and jointly complete the train control and dispatching.In this paper,a virtual coupling train formation control method based on the model predictive control(MPC)framework is proposed.From the establishment of the virtual coupling system,the construction of an MPC model and decoupling method,how to integrate virtual coupling technology into the rail transit train collision protection is studied.The safety and reliability of the system are calculated through fault tree and the method of constructing reliability function.The research shows that if virtual coupling technology is used for train collision protection,the overall safety and reliability of the train control system is improved.

Virtually coupled train set control subject to space-time separation:A distributed economic MPC approach with emergency braking configuration

The emerging virtual coupling technology aims to operate multiple train units in a Virtually Coupled Train Set(VCTS)at a minimal but safe distance.To guarantee collision avoidance,the safety distance should be calculated using the state-of-the-art space-time separation principle that separates the Emergency Braking(EB)trajectories of two successive units during the whole EB process.In this case,the minimal safety distance is usually numerically calculated without an analytic formulation.Thus,the constrained VCTS control problem is hard to address with space-time separation,which is still a gap in the existing literature.To solve this problem,we propose a Distributed Economic Model Predictive Control(DEMPC)approach with computation efficiency and theoretical guarantee.Specifically,to alleviate the computation burden,we transform implicit safety constraints into explicitly linear ones,such that the optimal control problem in DEMPC is a quadratic programming problem that can be solved efficiently.For theoretical analysis,sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the recursive feasibility and stability of DEMPC,employing compatibility constraints,tube techniques and terminal ingredient tuning.Moreover,we extend our approach with globally optimal and distributed online EB configuration methods to shorten the minimal distance among VCTS.Finally,experimental results demonstrate the performance and advantages of the proposed approaches.