A Novel Approach for Active Adhesion Control of High-Speed Trains Under Antiskid Constraints

Wheel skid is highly undesirable because it could endanger the safe operation of high-speed trains. How to avoid excessive wheel skid via an active adhesion control method represents an interesting and challenging topic of research. In this work, we first introduce the conditions of antiskid operation and formulate it as a constrained tracking control problem, based on which two model-based antiskid slip velocity control laws are developed. Then, by applying two adaptive force observers to estimate the unknown and varying adhesion force and resistance, we develop an adaptive antiskid adhesion control scheme. The novelty of the proposed method is that control errors of the closed-loop system are used to online update the observer parameters, such that the predefined control precision can be ensured with the proposed observer-based adhesion control. To deal with the constrained antiskid control, a barrier Lyapunov function is constructed, and the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is theoretically authenticated with confirmation by numerical simulation.