Abstract
The issues addressed by the article concern the assessment of energy efficiency in rail transport, resulting from the proper organization of rail traffic. The problems related to energy consumption and, thus, the negative impact of rail transport on the natural environment are highly significant in terms of the green deal concept, climate change and sustainable development. In this article, energy efficiency is investigated in the context of minimizing the energy consumption necessary to satisfy a specific transport requirement. The essence of this article is to present an approach to energy-efficient planning of rail freight traffic. This article aims to develop a method covers the allocation of railway vehicles dedicated to freight traffic (locomotives and railcars) to perform a defined transport task, taking into account the energy efficiency assessment of the solution, routing the train launched with regard to the accomplishment of the defined transport task on the railway network, and determining the conditions of transport for a defined transport task, taking into account the allocated rolling stock (locomotives and railcars) and the route. In this article, based on the presented state of knowledge, a decision-making model has been proposed, including the model’s parameters, the values being searched for, indicators for assessing the quality of the solution, as well as the limitations and boundary conditions of the problem. The function of minimizing the energy consumption necessary to transport a shipment within the railway network (determining the energy efficiency of the proposed solution) has been proposed as the criterion. In addition, a description of the proprietary method of selecting rolling stock for accomplishing tasks, based on the assessment of the energy efficiency of the solution and a case study illustrating the operation of the method on the example of the area of Poland, has been presented.
Highlights
Railway transport has always been predisposed for shipping mainly bulk cargo in national and international transport [1] between centres of the high concentration of cargo flows and of their termination over medium and long distances, as well as for passenger transport through international and regional services and, above all, in agglomeration areas [2,3,4]
On the one hand, rolling stock is selected in the form of railway vehicles dedicated for freight traffic: locomotives and railcars for implementing a defined transport task, taking into account the fact that the rolling stock inventory is limited; on the other hand, routing is performed for the train launched in connection with executing the defined transport task in the railway network
The subject of the case study is the selection of rolling stock for the transport task, which is the transport of stone from the Gralewo station to the Wrocław Brochów station
Summary
Railway transport has always been predisposed for shipping mainly bulk cargo in national and international transport [1] between centres of the high concentration of cargo flows (e.g., mines or refineries) and of their termination (e.g., power plants or ports) over medium and long distances, as well as for passenger transport through international and regional services and, above all, in agglomeration areas [2,3,4]. The cost of rail transport [5,6] and the dynamic development of other modes of transport mean that railway decision-makers responsible for rail transport take measures allowing an increase of interest in rail transport. This applies primarily to the implementation of innovative solutions that will allow railways to properly adapt to market expectations, in particular to customer expectations [7,8]. An important aspect of this problem is to include considerations for the limitation of the rolling stock count
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