Research on the stability of virtual coupling train formation based on PID controller under the influence of time delay

Abstract As the latest research direction of train-to-train communication between trains, virtual coupling train formation technology has attracted the attention of many scholars. This paper studies the influence of time delay on the formation of virtual coupled trains. And then we proposed a distributed PID controller, which makes the trains can still form a stable fleet operation under the influence of communication delay and control delay. After modeling and analysis, the research uses Matlab to conduct simulation, involving two sets of experiments, including the speed, acceleration, position, position error, expected distance between adjacent trains and the actual distance between adjacent trains are simulated. The results demonstrate that the distributed PID controller can effectively control the impact of time delay on the virtual coupling fleet.