Distributed Cooperative Cruise Control for High-Speed Trains with Energy-Saving Optimization

With the aim of improving the energy utilization during the cooperative operation of multiple trains, this paper proposes an optimal distributed cooperative cruise control strategy to ensure safe and efficient tracking. A performance index function with distributed characteristics is constructed by considering the state errors among trains and energy consumption. An LQR-based optimal design technique is applied to cooperative cruise control to optimize the cooperative control gain to find the optimal solution. Additionally, the scalar coupling gains are introduced to decouple the design of the optimal cooperative control gain from the communication topology of trains. Thus, the proposed strategy is robust for arbitrary directed communication topologies and can eventually be used to achieve the distributed tracking optimization of multiple trains. The asymptotic stability of the system is proved strictly by exploiting the Hurwitz and Lyapunov stability theorem. A numerical simulation example is given to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed strategy.