A Green Transportation Planning Approach for Coal Heavy-Haul Railway System by Simultaneously Optimizing Energy Consumption and Capacity Utilization

Jianjun Fu and Junhua Chen
Additional contact information
Jianjun Fu: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, No.3 Shang Yuan Cun, Hai Dian District, Beijing 100044, China
Junhua Chen: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, No.3 Shang Yuan Cun, Hai Dian District, Beijing 100044, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 8, 1-25

Abstract: Coal heavy-haul railway has been aiming at maximizing capacity utilization, but ignoring energy consumption for a long time. With the focus on green production, heavy-haul railways need transportation organization plans that can balance energy consumption and capacity utilization. Based on this, this paper proposes a data mining + optimization framework that uses train trajectory data to estimate train energy consumption and then uses a mixed integer programming model to simultaneously optimize plans from energy and capacity aspects. We use Gaussian distribution to describe features of energy consumption under different situations, and build a multi-dimensional cube to store these features to connect with the optimization model. In addition, a branch-and-bound algorithm is design to solve the optimization model. From the sensitivity analyses we can conclude that (1) shortening the departure interval from 13 min to 9 min will generate more energy consumption, about 3.6%; (2) combining short-form trains (50 units) with long-form trains (100 units) while increasing the carrying capacity will generate more energy consumption, about 5~14%; and (3) by controlling weights of the optimization model, capacity–energy-balanced plans can be obtained. The results can contribute to improving the sustainability of railways.

Keywords: coal heavy-haul railway; railway train trajectory data; energy consumption; capacity utilization; simultaneously optimizing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/8/4173/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/8/4173/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:8:p:4173-:d:532656

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().