An energy-efficient rescheduling approach under delay perturbations for metro systems

Due to the increasing energy prices and environmental issues, energy conservation for metro trains has become an important research topic in recent years. The static timetable optimization approach can reduce the trains’ energy consumption to a certain degree by scheduling multiple trains’ movements. However, this optimization approach is prone to fail when one or some trains are delayed at stations. This paper develops an energy-efficient rescheduling approach under delay perturbations for metro trains, which aims to minimize the net energy consumption under the premise of reducing or eliminating the delay altogether. Firstly, we provide an illustrative example to describe the rescheduling problem. Furthermore, we formulate an integer programming model and design an allocation algorithm to obtain the optimal schedule. Finally, a numerical example based on the Beijing Metro Yizhuang Line shows that the developed approach can reduce the net energy consumption by 8.19% in comparison with the traditional rescheduling approach.