Fuzzy Control of the Length and Location of the Look-Ahead Window in a Look-Ahead Control Approach to Reduce Fuel Consumption in Rail Transportation

Look-ahead control is a new approach for reducing fuel consumption in road and rail transportation industry. In this approach, considering the slope of ahead path, speed changes were decided on using a fuzzy controller so that, if there is an uphill on the ahead path, speed should be increased so that the vehicle could easily pass and fuel consumption is reduced. In the structure of this algorithm, a part of the ahead path is considered as a look-ahead window and the average slope of its inside points indicates the slope of the ahead path. Length of the look-ahead window and its distance from the vehicle's instantaneous location are two main parameters of look-ahead algorithms that affect their performance. In this paper, unlike the previous studies in which length and location of the look-ahead window kept constant during the whole path, these two parameters changed dynamically by a fuzzy controller according to the speed of the vehicle and slope variance of the points inside the window. Results of the simulation of train motion using the proposed algorithm demonstrated better performance of the algorithm and increased fuel efficiency.