A train regulation approach for energy-saving: a case study for Beijing metro line

The passenger flow at stations are stochastic and even a good timetable will cannot cope with its stochastic variation. To efficiently use the timetable, this paper proposes a regulation approach for train operation. For the scenario with a small passenger flow, the dwell time will be shortened according to the number of boarding and alighting passengers. The reduced dwell time will be added to the running time for the next interval such that the energy consumption of this interval will be reduced with a longer running time which implies a lower running grade in urban rail. Starting with the investigation of the invalid dwell time, the running time of different running grades is determined by assigning the buffer time to intervals to minimize the total energy consumption of a cycle time. Based on the operational data, a case study for Beijing Yizhuang line is presented to iIIustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.