Abstract
There are many different aspects to be analyzed when designing a railway infrastructure. The energy system, which withstands the demand for energy from operating trains, must consider many factors to create a functional infrastructure, in terms of demanded energy and cost sustainable. The methodology proposed gives a set of possible solutions to the designer or engineer. On the one hand, this method works with a multi-objective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), with high time efficiency. The main target of this work is to obtain the best electrical configuration in terms of number and location of substations and characteristics of the overhead line system. On the other hand, best configurations must take into account things such as real railway operation, signalling system, infrastructure, costs linked with environment, maintenance, construction and connection with general electric network, losses of energy dissipated along the catenary. Hence, this methodology must combine all of these skills and integrate it with a railway configuration, modelling and simulation tool, Hamlet developed at CITEF (Research Centre on Railway Technologies by Technical University of Madrid, Spain). After using this methodology, designers will have a set of configurations in order to get the final choice of location of traction substations and type of overhead line system to achieve properly the power demand from trains in railway systems.
Highlights
Designing a system with multiple variables and conditioning factors, such as the implementation of the power supply system in a railway infrastructure, makes the task of the planner difficult
Best configurations must take into account things such as real railway operation, signalling system, infrastructure, costs linked with environment, maintenance, construction and connection with general electric network, losses of energy dissipated along the catenary
The tests will be carried out with data obtained from a real project studied previously in CITEF. This project was chosen because the railway infrastructure adapts perfectly to the requirements specified with this optimization strategy, and on the other hand has interesting features for the study, such as for example a very pronounced height difference, which will increase traction efforts, and high regenerability effects in this area; this means that the variations in positioning and quantity of substations may be critical for the operation, which will be analyzed
Summary
Designing a system with multiple variables and conditioning factors, such as the implementation of the power supply system in a railway infrastructure, makes the task of the planner difficult. The thesis written by Johnston (1975) marks the interest in the study of optimization costs in railway infrastructures, and in the years when this thesis was written there was still not complete mastery of electricity within railway energy sizing, the author was already considering the planning to obtain the costs of implementing the electrical design and, how to find a work or calculation tool to calibrate the cost-quality ratio of the design. The leap in quality, occurs when methods are introduced, which leverage the studies reflecting the advantage of a railway infrastructure depending on a certain criterion. These studies are able to obtain a methodology, which improves those designs. The progression in the computation capacity has had a clear effect on the simulation algorithms and tools, and clearly, the inclusion and adaptation of the computation capacities have gone hand in hand with the progress made in the formal optimization techniques
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