Cooperative Control for Train Headway Adjustment in Railway Traffic

Train headway adjustment can optimize train operation and decrease train delay. The main objective of this work is to design a controller for a train fleet that can adjust their headways in a cooperative way. We proposed a train headway adjustment model based on linear quadratic optimal control. The effectiveness of the proposed model is initially validated through simulation. The simulation results demonstrate that trains can accomplish consensus in a leader structure, and the delay time can be reduced by 11.8% at most after using the proposed method. The computation time is less than 1 second when the number of trains in the fleet is not over 20.