Analysis of Longitudinal Rail Vehicle Dynamic and Design of Controller for Slip/Slide Protection

This study proposes a simulation design approach using MATLAB/Simulink to develop a rail vehicle dynamic model and to test wheel slip/slide protection (WSP) controllers. Instead of implementing and testing WSP device to the actual rail vehicle, which involves considerable financial investment, making simulation design is an attractive alternative. Two WSP controllers are designed. One is based on PID approach. The other one is hysteresis or bang-bang controller. The results show that PID controller exhibits superior performance with minimal slip and shorter stopping distances than hysteresis controller according to CENELEC standard EN15595 setup. The experiment is also performed under various adhesion conditions namely high and low adhesion simulating normal dry surface and degraded wet or contaminated surface rail conditions.