Symbolic multibody methods for real-time simulation of railway vehicles

In this work, recently developed state-of-the-art symbolic multibody methods are tested to accurately model a complex railway vehicle. The model is generated using a symbolic implementation of the principle of virtual power. Creep forces are modeled using a direct symbolic implementation of the standard linear Kalker model. No simplifications, such as base parameter reduction, partial-linearization or lookup tables for contact kinematics, are used. An Implicit–Explicit integration scheme is proposed to efficiently deal with the stiff creep dynamics. Real-time performance is achieved: the CPU time required for a very robust 1 ms integration time step is 203 µs.