Robust Control for Dynamic Train Regulation in Fully Automatic Operation System Under Uncertain Wireless Transmissions

For enhancing the operation efficiency of the fully automatic operation (FAO) system in the urban rail transit (URT), this paper investigates the robust dynamic train regulation problem with respect to frequent disruptions and imperfect wireless transmissions. To better express the characteristic of the arriving passengers, the fuzzy passenger arrival rate is adopted to address the uncertainty of the passenger flow, and a T-S fuzzy state-space model is established to express the periodical movement of the train traffic in an URT loop line. By considering the possible packet dropout phenomenon during the wireless data transmissions, which may lead to the instability of the train traffic system and degrade the performance of the regulation strategy, a robust real-time train regulation strategy is developed based on the fuzzy predictive control theory, which distinguishes existing studies in that the uncertainty dropout rate is contemplated to address the complexity of the actual operation environment. A sufficient condition for the proposed control law is presented to guarantee that the nominal train schedule is recovered from disturbed situations with a given attenuation level by means of the $H_{\infty }$ performance index, and meanwhile the optimization of the upper bound on the objective function balancing the service efficiency and control cost is achieved. Numerical simulations based on the Beijing subway loop line 2 are presented for demonstration of the effectiveness of the introduced strategy.

I. Introduction

With the development of the wireless communication and automation technology, there is a growing trend that the fully automatic operation (FAO) system is adopted by majority of the urban rail transit (URT) systems to promote the cost-effectiveness, traffic frequency and service flexibility [1]–[3]. It is estimated that nearly 75% of new URT lines will adopt the FAO system around the world [4], [5]. As a new generation of train control system in the URT, the FAO is a fully automatic, highly centralized train operation and control system, which involves the automated train operations without traditional on-board drivers.