Electrical Railway Dynamical Versus Static Models for Infrastructure Planning and Operation

Simulation tools are essential to design the infrastructure and plan the trains operations of electrical railway systems. Traditionally, the train model (that estimates the electrical, mechanical and kinematical behaviors of the vehicles) and electrical network model (that estimates the electrical behavior of the energy supply network) are developed separately. Then, they are simulated together to estimate the interactions between both subsystems. The paper objective is to compare different models to highlight the impacts on the interactions between the vehicles and the railway electrical network, which are crucial to have accurate estimations of the system behavior. For this purpose, a new dynamical model, which is based on a systemic approach and a causality analysis, is compared to a conventional static model, which is based on a cartesian approach and a power flow analysis. The dynamical model is accurate and has been experimentally validated but requires a long computational time. The static model is fast to compute and give a good estimation of the energy consumption for conventional railway systems. However, it is not always able to estimate the power flows within the DC network, and especially when all traction power substations are blocked.