Black-box modelling of nonlinear railway vehicle dynamics for track geometry assessment using neural networks

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ABSTRACTThe use of vehicle dynamics simulation for the track geometry assessment gives rise to new demands. In order to analyse the responses of the vehicles to the measured track geometry defects, the integration of the simulation process in the measurement chain of the track geometry recording car is envisaged. Fast and reliable simulation results are required. This work studies the use of black-box modelling approaches as an alternative to multi-body simulation. The performances of different linear and nonlinear black-box models for the simulation of the vertical and lateral bogie accelerations are compared. While linear transfer function models give good results for the simulation of the vertical responses, their use is not suitable for the highly nonlinear lateral vehicle dynamics. The lateral accelerations are best represented by recurrent neural networks. For the training and validation on high-speed lines using measured vehicle responses, the performance of the black-box simulation outperforms the multi-body simulation. Due to the larger variability of track design and track quality conditions on conventional lines, the model performance degrades and depends significantly on the analysed vehicle type and the track characteristics.