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Proceedings of the 37th Chinese Control Conference

July 25-27, 2018, Wuhan, China

A Nonlinear Feedback Adaptive Control Method for Improving


the Control Performance of Automatic Train Operation
Shigen Gao1,∗ , Hairong Dong1 , Bin Ning1 , Hongwei Wang2
1. State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
2. National Research Center of Railway Safety Assessment, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

Abstract: Automatic train operation technique has gone through developments and advances in urban railways for decades
of years in China, which is now a mature technique that frees the train driver from continuous operation during the running
process. With respect to the main line railways and high-speed railways, demonstration project and tentative endeavors have
been conducted, which are designed to fully exert the capacities of Chinese Train Control System Level 2 and 3 (CTCS-2/3)
systems. This paper addresses a nonlinear feedback adaptive control method for improving the tracking control performance
of automatic train operation, the feature of the proposed method is that the implemented control gains and learning rates of
adaptation laws adjust automatically along with the varying tracking performance during the operation process, which is realized
by a well-constructed continuous differentiable nonlinear feedback function. The proposed method requires no prior precise
information of the operational resistances, and both theoretical analysis and comparative results demonstrate the effectiveness of
the proposed method.

1 Introduction train. Peter and Mohamed [8] presented a suboptimal con-


trol method for multilocomotive powered trains. Yasunobu
Recent years have witnessed widespread applications of et al. [9] applied the fuzzy control for automatic train oper-
automatic train operation (ATO) in urban rail transits, which ation system. Chang et al. [10] studied the pareto-optimal
improves the automation level and line efficiency of the sig- set based multiobjective tuning of fuzzy automatic train op-
nalling system [1–5]. With the expanding railway networks eration for mass transit system. Eugene Khmelnitsky [11] p-
among cities in China, namely, the Pearl River Delta region resented an optimal control method of train operation. Yang
in China, the mode of Chinese Train Control System Level and Sun gave a mixed H2 /H∞ cruise controller design for
Two (CTCS-2) plus ATO has been successfully implement- high speed train. Song [12] studied the adaptive optimal
ed, which has been proved to an effective scheme to guaran- power brake distribution of high speed trains with uncertain
tee the train operation and improve the transport efficiency. nonlinear couplers. Wen et al. [13] studied the multi-model
The schematic structure of the CTCS-2 plus ATO is shown in direct generalised predictive control for ATO system. Li et
Fig. 1, where it can be observed that the ground equipments al. [14] presented a robust output feedback cruise control for
contain communication control server (CCS), train control high speed train movement with uncertain parameters. Zhao
center (TCC), temporary speed restriction server (TSRS), et al. [15] studied a distributed cruise control of high-speed
track circuits, balise, GSM-R, and so on, the onboard equip- trains.
ments contain automatic train protection (ATP), automatic
train operation (ATO) and other related units [6]. ĂĂ
Particularly, the ATP unit generates the dynamic veloc- Wireless com. GSM-R
Automatic Automatic
ity profile (velocity-distance profile) in a target-distance- train train
Track circuits
Balise info.
continuous-velocity control mode based on the moving au- DMI operation protection
Odometry
Velocity
sensor

thority, line parameters, the value of temporary speed restric- Train


Train interface VS BRA CRA
tion, train parameters, etc., and monitors the safe operation
of trains. The ATO unit takes charge of driving the train BTS BTS
Communication
to track an off-line optimized velocity-distance profile under networks
Onboard OTE OTE
the common braking curve of ATP. To this ends, advanced equipment
(ǁŝƚŚATO) Wayside TCC CTC
control methods play an important role in view of the com- equipment
CCS GSM-R
plex operational environments and uncertain dynamic char- TSRS

acteristics. Proportion-integral-derivative (PID) control was ATO: automatic train operation BTS: base transceiver station CTC: centralized traffic control
OTE: optical transmission device BRA: balise receiving antenna CCS: comm. control server
the first automatic control algorithm for ATO implemented DMI: driver machine interface CRA: circuits receiving antenna TSRA: temp. speed restriction server

firstly on the Victoria line of London in 1968. Afterwards,


many more advanced control methods have developed aim- Fig. 1: Structure of CTCS2 and ATO.
ing to improve certain control performance. To name a few,
Kunihiko [7] studied the application of optimization theo- In this paper, a new nonlinear feedback based adaptive
ry for bounded state variable problems to the operation of control method is designed for improving the tracking con-
trol performance of ATO system. Compared with previous
This work is supported jointly by the National Natural Science Foun- works in above-mentioned literatures, the main contribution-
dation of China (Nos. 61790573 and 61703033), State Key Laboratory of
Rail Traffic Control and Safety (No. RCS2018ZT013), Beijing Jiaotong
s of this paper are twofold. First, in comparison with the
University. state feedback control methods in the above-mentioned lit-
∗ Corresponding author. Email: gaoshigen@bjtu.edu.cn. eratures and the references therein, this paper utilizes a non-

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linear feedback technique, originally proposed in our previ- Property 2: Define Nf (s) := Nd (s) · s + N (s), then
ous work [16] for a class of uncertain strict-feedback non- Nf (s) is a monotone increasing function versus s, and
linear systems, to improve the tracking control performance Nf (s) · s ≥ N (s) · s is true.
of automatic train operation process by virtue of a continu-
3 Main Results
ous nonlinear function. Second, a non-quadratic form Lya-
punov function is constructed to prove the closed-loop sta- The adaptive control design will be designed based on the
bility, which guarantees that the tracking error respect to the following coordinates transformation:
target velocity-distance profile can be adjusted to as small 
as possible by choosing proper design parameters, and the e(t) =p(t) − pd
(4)
estimation errors of unknown coefficient of Davis equation, ė(t) =v(t) − ṗd = v(t) − vd
which reflects the uncertain operational resistance, are also
where pd and vd denote the desired distance and velocity
guarantee to converge to small regions tunable by design pa-
values derived from the pre-determined profile. To facilitate
rameters.
the control design, we introduce the following filtered error
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
variable n(t):
gives some preliminaries and formulated problem. The non-
n(t) = ė(t) + αe(t) (5)
linear feedback based adaptive control is designed in Section
3, where the closed-loop system is also proved to be stable. with α being a positive constant. Differentiating both sides
Section 4 presents comparative results to demonstrate the ef- of (5), one has
fectiveness of the proposed method, some next step works
ṅ =ë + αė
are also briefly introduced in Section 5. Section 6 ends this
paper with conclusions. =u(t) − f (v, t) − v̇d + αė (6)

2 Problem Formulation and Preliminaries Designing the control u(t) as


 n
The train dynamics of the longitudinal motion can be u(t) = −k Nf (n) + + â + b̂v + ĉv 2 + v̇d − αė (7)
modelled as the following second-order nonlinear system: m
 where k and m are positive constants, â, b̂ and ĉ are the es-
ṗ(t) =v(t) timated values of unknown Davis coefficients, respectively,
(1)
v̇(t) =u(t) − f (v, t) which are updated by the following adaptive laws:
where f (v, t) = a+bv +cv 2 is the Davis equation that mod- â˙ = − δa [Nf (n) + σa â] (8a)
els the basic and air friction forces with a, b and c being un-  
˙
known positive constants. The target of the automatic train b̂ = − δb Nf (n)v + σb b̂ (8b)

operation can be given as: for a given reference velocity- ĉ˙ = − δc Nf (n)v 2 + σc ĉ (8c)
distance profile versus time, the actual train can track the
target profile automatically without requiring the precise in- where δa > 0, δb > 0, and δc > 0 are learning rate coeffi-
formation of the operational resistances. For both theoretical cients, σa , σb , and σc are small constants.
and practical purposes, the reference profile needs to be s- One can summarize the above-design procedures as the
mooth enough such that the distance, speed and acceleration following theorem.
values versus time are all bounded. Theorem 1. Consider the train dynamics with unknown pa-
Lemma 1. A nonlinear feedback function has been proposed rameters described by (1). If the designed controller in (7)
in our previous work for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear and the corresponding adaptation laws (8) are implement-
systems, which is briefly introduced here, one refers [16] for ed, then, i), the actual real-time distance and velocity can
more details. be guaranteed to track the desired ones with the adjustable
In order to improve the dynamic performance of con- tracking errors, which can adjusted to arbitrarily small by
trollers and facilitate the stability analysis using Lyapunov choosing proper design parameters, and ii), the closed-loop
theorem, a continuous differentiable nonlinear gain function signals are all kept bounded.
is designed as follows:
⎧ Proof. Substituting (7) into (6) yields the closed-loop dy-
⎨ s, if |s| ≤ Δ namics as
N (s) = [loga (1 − ln a · Δ + ln a · |s|) + Δ] sign(s),  n
⎩ ṅ = − k Nf (n) + + â + b̂v + ĉv 2 − f (v, t)
if |s| > Δ m
(2)  n
where a > 1, Δ > 0. This designed nonlinear gain function = − k Nf (n) + + ã + b̃v + c̃v 2 (9)
m
holds the following properties.
Property 1: The function N (s) is a continuous differen- where ã = â−a, b̃ = b̂−b, c̃ = ĉ−c are the estimation errors
tiable strictly-monotone increasing function versus its argu- of Davis coefficient, respectively. Consider the Lyapunov

2 2 2
ment s, and its derivative is function as V = N (n)n + (1/2) ãδa + b̃δb + c̃δc , and its
 derivative along (8) and (9) can be calculated as
1, if |s| ≤ Δ
Nd (s) = −1 ˙
(1 − ln a · Δ + ln a · |s|) , if |s| > Δ ãã˙ b̃b̃ c̃c̃˙
(3) V̇ =Nf (n)ṅ + + +
δa δb δc

7783
104 0.005
Nonlinear feedback AC
Linear feedback AC
20 0
10-8
-0.005 5
0

-0.01 -0.005 0

-5
2
-0.01
-0.015
-10
-0.015
-0.02 130 130.5 131 131.5
-0.02 10-4
0
-0.025 -0.025
-5
-0.03 -0.03
-10
-0.035
-0.035
-15
0 20 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
0 0 -0.04
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
t (s) t (s)

Fig. 2: Reference velocity and distance profiles. (a) Comparative filtered tracking error n(t) of Case 1.

10-3
 0.5
Nonlinear feedback AC
Nf (n)n
= − k Nf2 (n) +
Linear feedback AC
+ ãNf (n) + b̃vNf (n) 0
m
˙ -0.5 10-3 10-7
ãã˙ b̃b̃ c̃c̃˙ 0.5
+ c̃v 2 Nf (n) + + + -1 0
15
δa δb δ 10
 c -0.5
N (n)n -1.5 5
= − k Nf2 (n) +
f
− σa ãâ − σb b̃b̂ − σc c̃ĉ -1
0
m -2 -1.5 300 350 400
(10) -2 10-4
0
-2.5 -2.5

Noting that −σa ãâ = −σa ã (ã + a) ≤ + − σ2a ã2 σa 2


2 a , -3
-3 -10

−σb b̃b̂ ≤ − σ2b b̃2 + σ2b b2 , −σc c̃ĉ ≤ + − σ2c c̃2 σc 2


2 c , -3.5
-3.5
-4 -20
Nf (n)n ≥ N (n)n it follows 0 50 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000


-4
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
Nf (n)n σa 2 σb 2 σc 2
V̇ ≤ − k Nf2 (n) +
t (s)
− ã − b̃ − c̃
m 2 2 2 (b) Comparative filtered tracking error n(t) of Case 2.
σa 2 σb 2 σc 2
+ a + b + c Fig. 3: Trajectories of filtered tracking errors n(t).
2 2 2
kN (n)n σa 2 σb 2 σc 2
≤− − ã − b̃ − c̃
m 2 2 2
σa 2 σb 2 σc 2 There exists some time moment t = T , the term e−T t ≈ 0
+ a + b + c when t > T , in this sense, the
2  2 2   ultimate bound

ofthe
k P
filtered error n is |n| ≤ max T Δ , min P
≤ − min , σa δa , σb δb , σc δc V + P (11) T ,Δ .
m
˜
Similarly,
  bounds of A are
the transient and ultimate
σa 2 σb 2 σc 2
with P := 2 a + 2 b + 2 c . From (11), one has 2δA V (0)e−T t + 2δTAP
and 2δA P
, respectively,
T
where A ∈ {a, b, c}. It is also noticeable that the above-
V (t) ≤V (0)e− min{ m ,σa δa ,σb δb ,σc δc }t
k
mentioned bounds can be adjusted to as small as possible
P by choosing proper design parameters. Other closed-loop
+ k  (12) signals are guaranteed to be bounded by similar arguments
min m , σa δa , σb δb , σc δc
in previous works [17–20], which is not discussed in details
where V (0) is the initial value of V (t). When the filtered here. The proof completes. 
error n(t) satisfies |n(t)| ≤ Δ, N (n)n = n2 , or else, 4 Simulation Results
N (n)n = [loga (1 − ln a · Δ + ln a · |n|) + Δ] |n| ≥
Δ|n|. As a component of the Lyapunov function, In this section, simulation and comparative results are p-
N (n)n ≤ V is known to be  always true. As a
resented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
method. The following traditional adaptive controller will
result, n satisfies |n| ≤ V (0)e−T t + P
T with
k  be utilized for unprejudiced comparison:
T := min m , σa δa , σb δb , σc δc if |n| ≤ Δ, if
not, |n| ≤ V (0)e
−T t
+ TPΔ . In short, the bound- u(t) = − kn + â + b̂v + ĉv 2 + v̇d − αė (13a)
Δ
ed value
 of the filtered error n is obtained as |n| ≤ â˙ = − δa [n + σa â] (13b)
V (0)e−T t  
max P
+ T Δ , min P
V (0)e−T t + T , Δ . ˙
Δ b̂ = − δb nv + σb b̂ (13c)

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10-3
0.01 2
Nonlinear feedback AC
0.005 Linear feedback AC Nonlinear feedback AC
1 Linear feedback AC
0

-0.005 10-4 0
0.01
10-3 10-4
-0.01 0 2
0
-1 0
-1
-0.015 0
-0.01 -2
-2
-0.02 -3 -2
-0.02
-2
-4 -4
-0.025 -0.03
-5 -3
-4 -6
-0.03 -0.04 -6 0 50 100 150 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
0 10 20 30 1960 1980 2000
-0.035 -4
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
t (s) t (s)

(a) Comparative velocity tracking errors. (a) Comparative velocity tracking errors.

0.04 0.025
Nonlinear feedback AC Nonlinear feedback AC Linear feedback AC
Linear feedback AC 0.02
0.02
0.015

0 0.01
0.01 0.01
0 0.01
0.005
-0.02 0.005
-0.02 0.005
0 0 0
-0.04 -0.04
0 -0.005 -0.005
-0.06 -0.01
-0.01 -0.01
-0.06 -0.005
-0.08 -0.015
-0.015 -0.02
-0.08 -0.1 -0.01 -0.02
-0.02 0 20 40 60 80 1960 1980 2000
0 20 40 1960 1980 2000
-0.1 -0.025
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
t (s) t (s)

(b) Comparative distance tracking errors. (b) Comparative distance tracking errors.

Fig. 4: Comparative results of Case 1 (Red solid line: er- Fig. 5: Comparative results of Case 2 (Red solid line: er-
ror using nonlinear feedback adaptive control; Blue dot line: ror using nonlinear feedback adaptive control; Blue dot line:
error using linear feedback adaptive control). error using linear feedback adaptive control).

ĉ˙ = − δc nv 2 + σc ĉ (13d) Commission for trains in Europe since 1996. Currently, A-


the notations in this controller are the same as the ones in TO system in the CTCS-3 (or ETCS-2) signalling system
Theorem 1. In the simulation results, the control parameters for high-speed trains is still a worldwide open problem with
are set as exactly the same ones, this guarantees the impar- respect to both theoretical research and practical applica-
tiality of the comparative results. The desired velocity and tion. As a safety critical system, any changes may result in
distance profiles versus time are presented in Fig. 2. The the degradation of function and safety integrality level since
parameters used in the simulation results are set as follows: high-speed trains are drove manually currently under CTCS-
α = 0.1, a = 0.8, b = 0.005, c = 0.00032, Δ = 0.002, 3 system. In this sense, it is a nontrivial attempt to achieve
δa = 1, δb = 0.1, δc = 0.01, σa = σb = σc = 0.05, the ATO system for high-speed trains.
v(0) = p(0) = 0, â(0) = 0.6, b̂(0) = 0.001, ĉ(0) = 0.0002. Looking into the future, there are several key issues to be
Two cases are given with case 1: k = 5, and case 2: k = 50. addressed in our next step works to facilitate the ATO in the
The comparative tracking errors in term of filtered error n(t) CTCS-2/3 signalling systems.
of two cases are given in Fig. 3, while Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 1) Runtime-data (RD) and core-model (CM) mixed-driven
present the comparative velocity tracking errors and distance modeling for high speed trains. In the existing litera-
tracking errors, respectively. These results demonstrate the tures, see [2–5] and the references therein, model-based
better tracking performance of the proposed method with control design has been widely utilized for ATO system
comparison to adaptive controller readily. with parameters fused from historical real data. Actu-
ally, model-based methods cannot capture the dynam-
5 Challenges and Prospects
ics of the high-speed train, which is affected by many
CTCS-3 is functionally similar to the European Train factors, including elastic flexible body, multiple rigid-
Control System level-2 (ETCS-2), utilized by the European body, weather conditions, gust, communication quali-

7785
ties, etc. The prior knowledge of these factors can not [4] S. Gao, H. Dong, Y. Chen, B. Ning, and G. Chen, “Adaptive
be obtained off-line even if enough historical data are and robust automatic train control systems with input satu-
available. The core idea of the RDCM mixed-driven ration,” Control and Intelligent Systems, vol. 41, no. 2, pp.
lies in that the mathematical model of high-speed trains 103–111, 2013.
is established by the organic integrity of CM based on [5] H. Dong, S. Gao, B. Ning, and L. Li, “Extended fuzzy logic
controller for high speed train,” Neural Computing and Appli-
historical data and RD reflecting the real-time opera-
cations, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 321–328, 2013.
tional environments. Theorematically speaking, such a [6] X. Xu, H. Yi, and Y. Wang, “Optimization of train control sys-
modeling method merges the merits of data-driven and tem using ctcs2+ato in intercity railways (in chinese),” Rail-
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6 Conclusions
eters,” Chinese Physics B, vol. 24, no. 1, p. 010503, 2014.
In this paper, a nonlinear feedback adaptive control [15] Y. Zhao, T. Wang, and H. R. Karimi, “Distributed cruise con-
scheme is developed for improving the tracking control per- trol of high-speed trains,” Journal of the Franklin Institute,
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with nonlinear output and virtual feedback errors,” Nonlinear
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resistances. Both theoretical analysis and comparative re- trol for uncertain nonlinear systems under input saturation via
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tercepted adaptation and single learning parameter approach,”
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