Active Guidance of a Railway Running Gear with Independently Rotating Wheels

The development of railway running gears with independently rotating wheels is a focus of research within the Next Generation Train project at DLR. The lateral guidance of this type of running gears represents a challenging problem that relies on active control. The paper introduces results on this research regarding observer and control design that are focused and demonstrated on a scaled experimental running gear hardware that was specifically constructed for this purpose. Additionally, the development of the lateral guidance system is supported by simulation and optimization within a Modelica based virtual simulation environment tailored for the modeling of railway vehicle dynamics in multi-domain engineering tasks.