Train cooperative control for headway adjustment in high-speed railways

In high-speed railways equipped with advanced train control systems, the train-to-train or train-to-ground communication technologies enable the trains to follow their former trains with a constant headway. Due to some disturbances (e.g., weather condition, train re-routing), the train following headway may be inconsistent between successive trains, which requires real-time headway adjustment to coordinate train operations by selecting proper speed curves to improve system performances (e.g., line capacity, energy consumption, power demand, etc) with constrains of safety, punctuality and comfort. This paper proposes a multi-train control model based on cooperative control to adjust train following headway. In particular, this train cooperative control model considers several practical constraints, e.g., train controller output constraints, safe train following distance. Then, this control problem is solved through a rolling horizon approach by calculating the Riccati equation with Lagrangian multipliers. Finally, two case studies are given through simulation experiments. The simulation results are analyzed which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.