Optimizing trains movement on a railway network

Focusing on solving critically important train operation problems on a railway network, this paper investigates a mathematical model for finding optimal trains movements under the consideration of operational interactions. With the predetermined routing and traversing order plan, we explicitly consider the optimization of energy consumption and travel time as the objective based on the coasting control methods. To reduce the calculation difficulties, simulation-based methodologies are proposed to compute the energy consumption and traversing time through using specific performance of the involved trains. A genetic algorithm integrated with simulation is designed to seek the approximate optimal coasting control strategies on the railway network. The numerical experiments investigate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.