Improving the Utilization of Regenerative Energy and Shaving Power Peaks by Railway Timetable Adjustment

Employing regenerative braking in trains contributes to reducing the amount of energy used, especially when applied to commuter trains and to those used on very dense suburban networks. This paper presents a method to fine-tune the periodic timetable to improve the utilization of regenerative energy and to shave power peaks while maintaining...

Hierarchical Model Predictive Control for on-Line High-Speed Railway Delay Management and Train Control in a Dynamic Operations Environment

In practice, the operation of high-speed trains is often affected by adverse weather conditions or equipment failures, which result in delays and even cancellations of train services. In this article, a novel two-layer hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) model is proposed for on-line high-speed railway delay management and train...

A Matheuristic for the Integrated Disruption Management of Traffic, Passengers and Stations in Urban Railway Lines

In big cities, the metro lines usually face great pressure caused by huge passengers demand, especially during peak hours. When disruptions occur, passengers accumulate quickly at stations. It is of great importance for dispatchers to take passenger flow control into consideration for the traffic management to ensure passengers' safety and to...

Pareto-based maintenance decisions for regional railways with uncertain weld conditions using the Hilbert spectrum of axle box acceleration

This paper presents a Pareto-based maintenance decision system for rail welds in a regional railway network. Weld health condition data are collected using a train in operation. A Hilbert spectrum-based approach is used for data processing to detect and assess the weld quality based on multiple registered dynamic responses in the axle box...

Automatic Defect Detection of Fasteners on the Catenary Support Device Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

The excitation and vibration triggered by the long-term operation of railway vehicles inevitably result in defective states of catenary support devices. With the massive construction of high-speed electrified railways, automatic defect detection of diverse and plentiful fasteners on the catenary support device is of great significance for...

Ensemble EMD-based automatic extraction of the catenary structure wavelength from the pantograph-catenary contact corce

This paper explores the use of pantograph-catenary contact force (PCCF) for monitoring of the current collection quality and detection of anomalies in the interaction between pantograph and catenary. The concept of catenary structure wavelength (CSW) is proposed as the dominant component of PCCF. It describes the signal components caused by the...