Abstract: As an important problem in high-speed railway systems, train operation control plays a significant role in minimizing energy consumption of trains and improving the operational efficiency of the railway system. A train operation control scheme based on the symmetric alternating direction method of multipliers is proposed for a single train operating on a railway line with several stations. The optimal train operation control problem is formulated by taking the passenger comfort, energy consumption and train punctuality as the objective, and the train operation dynamics, departure time from stations, velocity and traction force limits as constraints. Within the framework of the symmetric alternating direction multiplier method, the optimization problem is recast as two independent subproblems, and an alternate solving mechanism is introduced to obtain the optimal solution of the original problem. Numerical simulations show that the symmetric alternating direction multiplier method can obtain the optimal train control sequence in a smaller number of iterative steps compared to the alternating direction multiplier method, thus illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Key words: train control, symmetric alternating direction method of multipliers, optimal control of trains