Alessio La Bella was awarded with the Best Presentation Award during the SIDRA AUTOMATICA.IT 2023 conference, held at the University of Catania from 6 to 8 September 2023, presenting the recent results described in the paper “Switching Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of Collaborative Railway Vehicles in Catenary Grids”, written by Alessio La Bella, Gian Paolo Incremona and Patrizio Colaneri from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, and published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.
The article contributes to research in the field of railway control systems and proposes a new approach capable of making trains "collaborate", minimizing the train traction energy and the power losses in the catenary grid. The latter allows trains, through their pantographs, to absorb electrical energy for traction and re-inject it when generated by regenerative braking. The control system proposed by the authors allows the trains to optimally coordinate these operations, "exchanging" energy through the catenary grid. The train dynamics is represented by a combination of a finite number of operating modes, so that the control problem can be treated using switching techniques. Based on these models, a control system for sustainable train driving based on an innovative non-linear predictive control strategy is proposed.
The study compares this new control system with a non-collaborative version of the same, through simulations based on real data provided by the Alstom company. The result is that the proposed system outperforms its non-cooperative counterpart both in terms of traction energy saved and power lost along the catenary. It follows that the collaborative control system, based on energy exchange between trains, has a potentially positive impact on the sustainable management of railway systems.