Adaptive Partial Train Speed Trajectory Optimization

Train speed trajectory optimization has been proposed as an efficient and feasible method for energy-efficient train operation without many further requirements to upgrade the current railway system. This paper focuses on an adaptive partial train speed trajectory optimization problem between two arbitrary speed points with a given traveling time and distance, in comparison with full speed trajectory with zero initial and end speeds between two stations. This optimization problem is of interest in dynamic applications where scenarios keep changing due to signaling and multi-train interactions. We present a detailed optimality analysis based on Pontryagin’s maximum principle (PMP) which is later used to design the optimization methods. We propose two optimization methods, one based on the PMP and another based on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), to solve the problem. Both methods are designed using heuristics obtained from the developed optimality analysis based on the PMP. We develop an intuitive numerical algorithm to achieve the optimal speed trajectory in four typical case scenarios; meanwhile, we propose a new distance-based MILP approach to optimize the partial speed trajectory in the same scenarios with high modeling precision and computation efficiency. The MILP method is later used in a real engineering speed trajectory optimization to demonstrate its high computational efficiency, robustness, and adaptivity. This paper concludes with a comparison of both methods in addition to the widely applied pseudospectral method and propose the future work of this paper.