Modeling and analysis of global energy consumption process of urban rail transit system based on Petri net

Nowadays, urban rail transit has been the most effective solution to traffic congestion and has gradually become the main mode of urban public transport. However, with the gradual continuous expansion of urban rail transit scale, the energy consumption has increased dramatically. Electricity cost of urban rail transit accounts for nearly half of the total operation cost. The main distributions, proportion, and influencing factors of urban rail train operation and station energy consumption are analyzed in this paper, and the energy flow direction (namely energy consumption process) of the whole urban rail system is obtained. Based on above, a Petri net model for global energy consumption process of urban rail transit system is constructed, the formalized definitions of the model are given in detail, and the basic phenomena and dynamic behavior characteristics of the model are analyzed. Meanwhile, the transition importance evaluation index and method of the Petri net model for energy consumption process of global urban rail transit system are proposed. Through the simulation, analysis shows that the method can fully describe distributions, proportion, influencing factors, process structure, and dynamic behavior of urban rail transit system energy consumption. Results also reveal that the proposed model can effectively simulate the energy flow of urban rail transit system energy consumption process and evaluate the key link of the whole system energy consumption process. Finally, this study provides an auxiliary decision support in analyzing, optimizing, and promoting energy efficiency for the urban rail transit operator, which overcomes the limitations of the previous energy consumption studies in various specialties and subsystems of urban rail transit system.