The seasonal timetable defines for every day during a certain period, normally one year, which trains run along which track at which time. Stations and junctions are normally defined as referenced operational points in the railway system, and they will be abbreviated as OcpRefs in the rest of this paper. In practice, a targeted railway network is composed of tracks, stations or junctions, and trains running within this network according to a seasonal timetable. In recent years, the reduction of energy consuming has become one of the main concerns of the railway managers, and thus more and more projects have been kicked off in this domain, such as RailEnergy (cf., ) and GreenRail (cf., ). In modern railway system, most of the energy required by trains is supplied by the electric network. The results obtained by simulation show that the multi-mode control strategy overcomes the mono-mode control strategies with regard to global energy consumption, while there is no firm relation between the utilization rate of energy regenerated by dynamic braking operations and the reduction of total energy consumption. Six monomode strategies and one multimode strategy are tested and compared with the four scenarios extracted from the Belgian railway system.
A method based on genetic algorithm and empirical single train driving strategies is developed for this objective.
How to optimize the train synchronization so as to benefit from the energy regenerated by electronic braking is also considered in this study. In other words, it is expected to define suitable driving profiles for all the trains running within a specified period through the targeted network with an objective to minimize their total energy consumption. This study is aimed to develop an energy-efficient railway traffic control solution for any specified railway. The real-time traffic control has an important impact on the efficiency of the energy utilization in the modern railway network.