An Electrical Energy Allotment Method for a Large Railway Network

Abstract

Railway operators usually do not consider the limit of the electrical energy supply in Japan. Although technologies have been developed for energy efficiency, the limit on the available electrical energy is not considered. However, railway operators met the limit in summer 2011 after the earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku. In this study, we develop an electrical energy allotment method for a large railway network. The method optimizes train operations to provide better railway service when the energy supply is limited. We also develop a search method to find the optimal operation from very large combinations of operation factors. These optimization and search methods are evaluated using the Tohoku earthquake scenario. C⃝ 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 196(3): 49-57, 2016; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

A review of modelling and optimisation methods applied to railways energy consumption

“…Some studies focus on manually driven trains (Sicre et al, 2012) and others on trains equipped with Automatic Train Operation (ATO) (Brenna et al, 2016). Many of the aforementioned studies analyse the problem of a single train, while others take into account a whole set of trains and their interaction (Komaki et al, 2016;Tian et al, 2015). Apart from driving style, other factors may be included in the optimisation study, such as track geometry (Huang et al, 2015), on-board storage systems (Domínguez et al, 2010), regenerative brake (Tian et al, 2015) or variations of the train load .…”