Modeling and control challenges related to electrical rail vehicles

Modern rail vehicles with controlled converters are active elements in electrical railway networks. They combine fast nonlinear and hybrid inner loops with slower, sometimes approximately linear outer loops. Analysis of such systems with respect to linear and nonlinear time- and frequency-domain performance indicators on the drive and the line side is non-trivial, and optimal control system synthesis without manual iterations is still out of reach today. The present contribution describes some modeling and control tasks from an industrial perspective, pointing out possible directions for further theoretical work.