Improved sustainability of railway systems: The tesys rail project

While an important part of the total carbon dioxide emission is still caused by transport systems, the impact of railway systems is significantly lower with respect to the other ground and air concurrent systems. However, the current development trends will produce a significant improvement of the efficiency of cars and planes, thus reducing the sustainability advantages of railway systems. This paper presents research work, based on the activities of the TESYS Rail Project, deals with the optimization of railway energy consumptions in order to increase the efficiency of the system. From the simulation of railway systems, the aim of the activity is to investigate how the use of energy storage devices can really improve efficiency in different operating scenarios, and involving different train typologies. A further goal of the activity is the development of integrated design, simulation and optimization tools and the generation of a code that can be integrated in real time applications. Finally, the model proposed in this paper has been validated with a set of experimental results provided by an industrial partner.