Optimal network electrification plan for operation of battery-electric multiple unit regional trains

Abstract

The Netherlands have one of the highest rail electrification rates in the EU with over 75% of the railway network electrified (European Comission, 2018), offering environment-friendly trains operation. However, in order to achieve carbon neutral railway sector by 2050, significant investments are required to further improve environmental performance from trains operation, especially in regional nonelectrified networks with passenger services typically provided by diesel multiple unit (DMU) vehicles. Due to their low utilization, full electrification of such networks is often not economically viable, thus solutions are mainly sought in alternative propulsion system technologies, such as hydrogen fuel-cell multiple unit (FCMU) and battery-electric multiple unit (BEMU) vehicles (Klebsch et al., 2019). One of the main challenges in introducing BEMU trains is determining the electrification plan for the railway network, while satisfying requirements related to quality of service, maintaining current timetable, and vehicle-specific constraints. Previous research on BEMUs operation is mainly focused on continuous partial lines electrification, or eventually limited scenario analysis on intermittent electrification (Abdurahman et al., 2021), with the optimization-based methods still lacking in the literature. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing a method for developing an optimal electrification plan, while minimizing total costs and considering several electrification alternatives for each track section.