Energy-Efficient Train Control

Energy-Efficient Train Control
Author: Philip G. Howlett
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1447130847

Rail is potentially a very efficient form of transport, but must be convenient, reliable and cost-effective to compete with road and air transport. Optimal control can be used to find energy-efficient driving strategies for trains. This book describes the train control problem and shows how a solution was found at the University of South Australia. This research was used to develop the Metromiser system, which provides energy-efficient driving advice on suburban trains. Since then, this work has been modified to find practical driving strategies for long-haul trains. The authors describe the history of the problem, reviewing the basic mathematical analysis and relevant techniques of constrained optimisation. They outline the modelling and solution of the problem and finally explain how the fuel consumption can be minimised for a journey, showing the effect of speed limits and track gradients on the optimal driving strategy.

Computational Logistics

Computational Logistics
Author: Francesco Corman
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 761
Release: 2015-09-18
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319242644

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Logistics, ICCL 2015, held in Delft, The Netherlands, in September 2015. The 50 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They are organized in topical sections entitled: transport over ground, transport over water, international coordination within a system, external coordination among systems.

Comprehensive Costs of Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Crashes

Comprehensive Costs of Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Crashes
Author: Daniel Brod
Publisher: Transportation Research Board
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2013
Genre: Highway-railroad grade crossings
ISBN: 0309283485

"TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 755: Comprehensive Costs of Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Crashes describes a process for estimating the costs of highway-rail grade crossing crashes. A spreadsheet-based tool to facilitate use of the cost estimation process is available online." --Publisher description.

Railway Track Allocation

Railway Track Allocation
Author: Thomas Schlechte
Publisher: Sudwestdeutscher Verlag Fur Hochschulschriften AG
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9783838132228

This thesis is about mathematical optimization for the efficient use of railway infrastructure. We address the optimal allocation of the available railway track capacity - the track allocation problem. This track allocation problem is a major challenge for a railway company, independent of whether a free market, a private monopoly, or a public monopoly is given. Planning and operating railway transportation systems is extremely hard due to the combinatorial complexity of the underlying discrete optimization problems, the technical intricacies, and the immense sizes of the problem instances. Mathematical models and optimization techniques can result in huge gains for both railway customers and operators, e.g., in terms of cost reductions or service quality improvements. We tackle this challenge by developing novel mathematical models and associated innovative algorithmic solution methods for large scale instances. This allows us to produce for the first time reliable solutions for a real world instance, i.e., the Simplon corridor in Switzerland.

The Multi-Agent Transport Simulation MATSim

The Multi-Agent Transport Simulation MATSim
Author: Andreas Horni
Publisher: Ubiquity Press
Total Pages: 620
Release: 2016-08-10
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 190918876X

The MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) software project was started around 2006 with the goal of generating traffic and congestion patterns by following individual synthetic travelers through their daily or weekly activity programme. It has since then evolved from a collection of stand-alone C++ programs to an integrated Java-based framework which is publicly hosted, open-source available, automatically regression tested. It is currently used by about 40 groups throughout the world. This book takes stock of the current status. The first part of the book gives an introduction to the most important concepts, with the intention of enabling a potential user to set up and run basic simulations. The second part of the book describes how the basic functionality can be extended, for example by adding schedule-based public transit, electric or autonomous cars, paratransit, or within-day replanning. For each extension, the text provides pointers to the additional documentation and to the code base. It is also discussed how people with appropriate Java programming skills can write their own extensions, and plug them into the MATSim core. The project has started from the basic idea that traffic is a consequence of human behavior, and thus humans and their behavior should be the starting point of all modelling, and with the intuition that when simulations with 100 million particles are possible in computational physics, then behavior-oriented simulations with 10 million travelers should be possible in travel behavior research. The initial implementations thus combined concepts from computational physics and complex adaptive systems with concepts from travel behavior research. The third part of the book looks at theoretical concepts that are able to describe important aspects of the simulation system; for example, under certain conditions the code becomes a Monte Carlo engine sampling from a discrete choice model. Another important aspect is the interpretation of the MATSim score as utility in the microeconomic sense, opening up a connection to benefit cost analysis. Finally, the book collects use cases as they have been undertaken with MATSim. All current users of MATSim were invited to submit their work, and many followed with sometimes crisp and short and sometimes longer contributions, always with pointers to additional references. We hope that the book will become an invitation to explore, to build and to extend agent-based modeling of travel behavior from the stable and well tested core of MATSim documented here.

Operations research models for scheduling railway infrastructure maintenance

Operations research models for scheduling railway infrastructure maintenance
Author: Gabriella Budai-Balke
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN: 9036101263

This thesis can be divided into two parts. In Part I we are dealing with the problem of finding optimal time intervals for carrying out routine maintenance works and large projects in such a way that the track possession costs and maintenance costs are minimized. In Part II of this thesis we focus on rescheduling of the rolling stock in the passenger railways due to changing circumstances and more precisely on the Rolling Stock Rebalancing Problem (RSRP). The main objectives of this thesis are formulated as follows: 1. Review the existing literature on maintenance planning in relation with production. 2. Identify some tactical and operational railway infrastructure maintenance planning problems and develop operations research models for providing decision support. Investigate the effect of planning railway infrastructure maintenance on the train operation and identify rolling stock planning problems that occur during planned infrastructure maintenance. 3. Analyze the considered models, investigate their computational complexity, propose solution methods and test the solutions of the models.

Urban Stormwater Management in the United States

Urban Stormwater Management in the United States
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 611
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0309125391

The rapid conversion of land to urban and suburban areas has profoundly altered how water flows during and following storm events, putting higher volumes of water and more pollutants into the nation's rivers, lakes, and estuaries. These changes have degraded water quality and habitat in virtually every urban stream system. The Clean Water Act regulatory framework for addressing sewage and industrial wastes is not well suited to the more difficult problem of stormwater discharges. This book calls for an entirely new permitting structure that would put authority and accountability for stormwater discharges at the municipal level. A number of additional actions, such as conserving natural areas, reducing hard surface cover (e.g., roads and parking lots), and retrofitting urban areas with features that hold and treat stormwater, are recommended.