Fixed-Order Controller Design for a High Speed Railway Vehicle

Abstract

Advanced active suspension systems has attracted considerable attention in modern railway vehicle designs in recent years. The purpose of the suspension is to attenuate the vehicle vibrations due to various rail excitations. With active suspensions it is aimed to improve the performance in some cases, while not making it worse in others. The performance-related objectives can be approximately translated in different norm bounds on certain transfer functions or impulse responses. In this paper, a multi-objective problem is formulated as a non-convex and non-smooth optimization problem for a full-car railway vehicle modelled with seventeen-degrees-of-freedom (17 DOF) and excited by random rail inputs. The controller order restricted to be less than or equal to the passive system model order. For a range of orders, controllers are synthesized by using the HIFOO toolbox.