Cooperative predictive set point modulation control of high‐speed trains

Abstract Cooperative control of high‐speed trains can improve the safety and efficiency of high‐speed railway transportation. However, the velocity and distance overshoots in the cooperative control of multiple high‐speed trains is an undesirable behavior, which will lead to unsafe and inefficient train operation. To address this issue, a cooperative predictive set point modulation control approach for high‐speed trains is proposed. First, the cyber‐physical modeling of multiple high‐speed trains is presented. The longitudinal dynamic characteristics of high‐speed trains are established in the physical layer, and the cyber layer represents the communication topology of high‐speed trains based on graph theory. Second, a cooperative control rule is designed to achieve the velocity consensus and maintain safe distance between adjacent trains. Moreover, the set point automatic adjustment with correction enable (SPAACE) is leveraged to smoothly adjust the set‐point of high‐speed trains to suppress the overshoots of train velocities and inter‐train distance. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is verified in three different simulation scenarios: normal, acceleration and deceleration conditions. The simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the maximum relative displacement by 62% and the velocity error by 34%.