Fuel Consumption Optimization for a Diesel-Electric Locomotive Using Fuzzy Look-Ahead Control

Diesel-electric locomotives are one of the foremost elements of transportation systems and they consume significant portion of transportation fuel usage. One of the effective parameters in fuel consumption of these vehicles is acceleration and braking strategy according to train speed profile. Although the available numerical methods for calculating the optimal speed profiles present acceptable results¡ the use of these methods in the calculation is too time-consuming. To reduce the computation time¡ using fuzzy logic as an efficient method has been suggested. In this paper¡ a fuzzy look-ahead control approach is implemented to optimize fuel consumption of diesel-electric locomotives. A fuzzy controller will decide the speed changing by considering the gradient of the path ahead. Hence¡ a speed profile close to optimal speed profile will be achieved. Furthermore¡ the performance of control algorithm has been improved by a sensitivity analysis of look-ahead controller parameters. The simulation results of developed algorithm show that at least 2.7 percents reduction in fuel consumption of diesel-electric locomotives can be achieved.