Adaptive Sliding Mode Controller Design for Cruise Control of High Speed Trains

This paper studies application of sliding mode control for cruise control of high speed trains in the presence of parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. First, a state feedback sliding mode control law is designed to drive the tracking error to a positively invariant set which is arbitrarily bounded and contains the origin. It is shown that under suitable conditions, command tracking and disturbance rejection could be achieved simultaneously. Then, an adaptive mechanism is derived for switching gains to make the controller robust against perturbations with unknown upper bounds. In order to reduce chattering, a modified controller is proposed; achieving output tracking, but with smooth control effort. The design is performed for both Distributed Driving (DD) and Push-Pull Deriving (PPD) trains. Both designs are compared through numerical simulations.