A FOPID based decentralised control system for vibration control of railway vehicle using hybrid optimisation

This paper proposes a 17-degree-of-freedom dynamic railway vehicle model integrated with wheel-rail forces and active suspensions. The passive response of the model is validated with the experimental results. Afterward, a decentralised control structure having fractional order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controller has been formulated to mitigate the track disturbances. A novel metaheuristic optimisation technique named hybrid PSO-GWO has been proposed to provide the optimum force. The performance of FOPID controllers was evaluated in the time and frequency domain under the periodic and random track disturbances, and the results were compared against the passive system and classical tuning method. From the results, it is seen that hybrid PSO-GWO is more capable of reducing the vehicle accelerations as compared to other tuning methods as it can be able to reduce the lateral, roll, and yaw acceleration up to 77.81%, 75.29% and 63.74% under periodic and, 57.22%, 77.88%, and 69.58%, under random excitations.