Development of virtual running test environment for railway vehicles based on Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation to reproduce actual running on a track

Abstract

We report on a system of “Virtual running test environment for railway vehicles” based on the Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) approach that can replace most of the parts of an actual running test with a bench test and a computer simulation. If it is possible to reproduce the motion of a railway vehicle running on a track in detail by the use of the “Virtual running test environment for railway vehicles” system, an acceleration of the development process and the improvement of the quality of the railway vehicles can be expected. In this report, we introduce the entire configuration system. We introduce a number of actual uses of the system to achieve test objectives such as “Reproduction of the actual running test of a train set on the bench test,” “Performance evaluation of component equipped with the actual running vehicle,” and “Performance evaluation of unrealized virtual component.” Finally, we demonstrate some results. As an example, we conduct an excitation test of an actual car on the rolling stock testing plant in RTRI. We reproduce the actual running conditions of a three-car train and obtain good agreement between the HILS test and the target results.

Keywords

• railway vehicle
• virtual running test
• hardware in the loop simulation
• bench test
• rolling stock testing plant