An energy-efficient scheduling and speed control approach for metro rail operations

•An optimization method is developed to improve the operations of metro rail system.•It gives quantitative analysis on net energy consumption.•It optimizes the scheduling and speed control to minimize the energy consumption.•It reduces the net energy consumption of Beijing Metro Yizhuang Line around 25%. Due to increasing environmental concerns and energy prices, what is very important but has not been given due consideration is the energy efficiency of metro rail systems. Train energy-efficient operation consists of timetable optimization and speed control. The former synchronizes the accelerating and braking actions of trains to maximize the utilization of regenerative energy, and the latter controls the train driving strategy to minimize the tractive energy consumption under the timetable constraints. To achieve a better performance on the net energy consumption, i.e., the difference between the tractive energy consumption and the utilization of regenerative energy, this paper formulates an integrated energy-efficient operation model to jointly optimize the timetable and speed profile. We design a genetic algorithm to solve the model and present some numerical experiments based on the actual operation data of Beijing Metro Yizhuang Line of China. It is shown that a larger headway leads to smaller energy saving rate, and the maximum energy saving rate achieved is around 25% when we use the minimum allowable headway of 90s. In addition, compared with the two-step approach optimizing the timetable and speed profile separately, the integrated approach can reduce the net energy consumption around 20%.