Energy consumption minimization in railway planning

The estimation of running times is essential for the railway timetable definition. The trains travel duration must respect some constraints, which depend on the railway network. Usually, the running times minimize the trains travel duration on the railway network. They are typically calculated without considering the energy consumption. The green transportation has recently gained significant importance. In this paper, the energy consumption in the running times estimation is taken into account by defining an optimization problem to calculate the running times for the railway timetable definition. This optimization problem finds the running times which minimize the energy consumption. Precisely, an algorithm to handle the optimization problem with the integration platform for multi-objective and multi-disciplinary optimization modeFRONTIER is defined. The algorithm is tested on a case study and the results are validated with the OpenTrack Railway Simulation Tool.