Traction/braking control design for high speed trains based on force estimation- an more implementable approach

As adhesion coefficient of high speed train (HST) varies with wheel-rail surface condition and running speed, it is thus rather difficult to obtain its accurate value via online measurement, making it non-trivial to design and implement traction/braking control scheme for HST. In this paper, force observers are developed to estimate the adhesion force and the resistance, respectively. Traction/braking control is then designed by making use of the estimated adhesion force and resistance with consideration of actual wheel-rail adhesion condition. The proposed controller is more implementable as compared with most existing methods. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified via simulation.