Adaptive Distributed PI-like Control Protocol for the Virtual Coupling of Connected Heterogeneous Uncertain Nonlinear High-Speed Trains

Abstract

Virtual Coupling has been included among the most relevant innovations to be studied in the European Horizon 2020 Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking for increasing the railway lines capacity through the dynamic connection of two or more trains to form a convoy while preserving safety. Within this framework, this paper addresses the virtual coupling control problem for heterogeneous nonlinear uncertain connected high-speed trains. Leveraging the Multi-Agent Systems framework, a novel distributed robust and adaptive PI-like control scheme is proposed to solve the control problem. In order to provide suitable adaptive mechanisms for the control gains, we exploit the Lyapunov theory and Barbalat’s lemma and prove the asymptotic stability for the overall networked control system, as well as the boundedness of these signals. The virtual coupling objective is achieved in a fully-distributed fashion by limiting the amount of time-varying information necessary for the computation of the control action and, hence, saving communication channel bandwidth while reducing the computational burden. Exemplary numerical simulations are given to support the theoretical derivations and to prove the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy in a real driving scenario.