A Green Transportation Planning Approach for Coal Heavy-Haul Railway System by Simultaneously Optimizing Energy Consumption and Capacity Utilization

Coal heavy-haul railway has been aiming at maximizing capacity utilization, but ignoring energy consumption for a long time. With the focus on green production, heavy-haul railways need transportation organization plans that can balance energy consumption and capacity utilization. Based on this, this paper proposes a data mining + optimization framework that uses train trajectory data to estimate train energy consumption and then uses a mixed integer programming model to simultaneously optimize plans from energy and capacity aspects. We use Gaussian distribution to describe features of energy consumption under different situations, and build a multi-dimensional cube to store these features to connect with the optimization model. In addition, a branch-and-bound algorithm is design to solve the optimization model. From the sensitivity analyses we can conclude that (1) shortening the departure interval from 13 min to 9 min will generate more energy consumption, about 3.6%; (2) combining short-form trains (50 units) with long-form trains (100 units) while increasing the carrying capacity will generate more energy consumption, about 5~14%; and (3) by controlling weights of the optimization model, capacity–energy-balanced plans can be obtained. The results can contribute to improving the sustainability of railways.