Coordinated Time-Varying Low Gain Feedback Control of High-Speed Trains Under a Delayed Communication Network

The coordinated control problem for a multiple high-speed train (HST) system subject to unknown communication delays is systematically investigated in this paper. Taking into consideration the inertial lag of the servo motor, a third-order nonlinear control model is constructed to capture the dynamics of a train in real-world operations. By virtue of the backstepping linearization technique, the coordinated control of trains is formulated as a stabilization problem for a linear multiple-input multiple-output system with an unknown input delay. Distributed control laws with a time-varying low gain parameter are designed, besides solving the stabilization problem, to guarantee a fast convergency rate during the train status adjustment process. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate that the time-varying low gain parameter design achieves better control performance compared with the traditional constant low gain feedback design in terms of the convergency rate and the system overshot, and that the proposed control method is effective in train tracking distance adjustment.