Operational Control of High‐Speed Trains With Virtual Coupling Based on Second‐Order Nonsingular Integral Sliding Mode Prediction

ABSTRACT

Motivated by the need to achieve safe and reliable consistent tracking performance for virtual coupling high‐speed trains (HSTs) under complex disturbances and stringent constraints, this article proposes a novel Second‐Order Nonsingular Terminal Integral Predictive Sliding Mode Control (SNTI‐PSMC) methodology. Initially, to overcome the limitation of traditional sliding mode control (SMC) in enabling HSTs operation systems to rapidly reach steady‐state, a sliding mode surface is designed by integrating nonsingular terminal sliding mode and integral sliding mode. Then, a second‐order exponential sliding mode reaching law is designed to mitigate chattering in train operation control, while effectively improving the dynamic performance of the sliding mode surface. Meanwhile, to address the dynamic coupling characteristics of virtually coupled train sets (VCTS), a cooperative control method based on multi‐input multi‐output systems is proposed. By constructing a sliding mode prediction model and designing an objective function to achieve optimal system control, the robustness and anti‐disturbance capability of the system are enhanced. On this basis, safety tracking distance constraints are considered to fulfill the safety protection and control requirements of virtually coupled trains. Finally, hardware‐in‐the‐loop simulation experiments were conducted on a laboratory CRH380B HST virtual‐coupling test bench using real operational data to validate the proposed method. Simulation experiments and comparisons demonstrate that SNTI‐PSMC achieves significant advantages in tracking accuracy, system response speed, and chattering mitigation.