Optimization of Railway Operating in terms of Distribution System Voltage Drop

Today, electrified railway systems are involved in renewal processes, which address vehicles, wayside infrastructure and management of fleet of rolling stocks. Railway System Operators (RSOs) test how novel and innovative strategies impact of their own systems in order to reach energy efficiency targets. Due to the intrinsic interaction between the railway traction system and its primary grid, the feasibility of each innovative strategy has to be evaluated in terms of energy and power not only on the railway traction system, but also on its feeding grid. In the actual context forced by the constraint of Covit-19 virus, one of the more relevant strategies applied to urban railway systems is to operate the railway traction system with reduced values of headway. This strategy, which forces repetitive starts, in some cases contemporaneous, of rolling stocks, can produce severe voltage drops on the primary distribution grid. This paper proposes of examining the motion of a fleet of metro trains on a traction system fed by a MV distribution grid of reduced short circuit value. The numerical results point out how constraints imposed by the distribution grid at the Traction Power Substations can influence the control of moving the fleet of rolling stocks on the track.