Impacts of Energy Saving Strategies (ESSs) on rail services and related effects on travel demand

In railway systems, the evaluation of specific operating conditions and their impact on travel demand plays a key role both in planning and managing rail services. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of some energy saving strategies (ESSs) through the definition of energy-efficient speed profiles and estimate their effects on travel demand. In particular, speed profiles for ESSs need extra time for their implementation and hence entail a reduction in line performance. The definition of optimal speed profiles requires the use of optimisation procedures which can be formulated by considering motion parameters as control variables and energy consumption as the performance to be optimised (minimised), with respect to the available time. The proposed methodology is applied in the case of a real metro line, showing differences in user generalised costs, in order to provide additional information for rail operators which may allow evaluation of the best strategies to be adopted.