Reinforced Safe Performance Cooperative Control With Event-Triggered Implementation for Train Formation

This article presents a new safe fault-tolerant control scheme for train formation by designing an adaptive event-triggered reinforced performance technique. The new features and merits of the proposed method are as threefold aspects. 1) The proposed method integrates safety constraints on train position and speed into the control design process. A nonlinear transformation function is employed to convert constrained train states into unconstrained error variables, which simplifies the dealing of nonlinearities arising from safety constraints, ensuring trains maintain safe tracking distances and speeds. 2) by utilizing the projection algorithm, the proposed method estimates and compensates for actuator failures using safety-constrained train position and speed data. This method demonstrates superior tracking accuracy compared to existing fault-tolerant control algorithms, even in scenarios with actuator faults. In addition, considering the continuous control challenges due to the complex physical structure of high-speed trains, an event-triggered approach is introduced to alleviate unnecessary operations and minimize wear and tear on mechanical components caused by frequent updates. 3) In comparison to pioneering so-called prescribed performance control methodology, where the tracking errors are kept within predefined boundary functions regardless of control gains and other parameters, the “reinforced performance” of this work ensures that defined errors are guaranteed to evolve within regions characterized by predefined boundary functions and control parameters simultaneously, correspondingly, the ultimate convergence regions can be adjusted to be arbitrarily small by choosing proper control parameters.