Optimal PID controller for high-speed rail pantograph system with notch filter

The pantograph device must exert enough upward force to maintain sliding contact with the catenary at all times to avoid loss of contact due to excessive transient motion. This paper presented a global-oriented particle swarm optimization (GPSO) technique with Cauchy mutation for tuning the optimal control gains of PID controller in a high-speed rail pantograph device with notch filter. The proposed method used the global-oriented mechanism to enhance the computation efficiency of traditional PSO algorithm and used a Cauchy operator for escaping local minima. To verify the advantage of the proposed GPSO-PID controller, a refined integrated time weighted squared error (RITSE) performance criterion was employed and a pantograph system with notch filter was tested. The results showed that the proposed method was indeed adaptive and robust in quick search of the PID controller parameters. The GPSO-PID controller can decrease rapidly the contact force variation between the pantograph and the catenary.