• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.167-173
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• 2011

This paper considers the problem of revising train departure time to reduce electric power consumption of mass rapid transit (MRT) railways. The motion of a train running between stations is divided into three phases: traction, coasting, and deceleration phases. The traction phase requires high electric power to operate MRT railways. In the coasting phase, the train moves stably by consuming little or no power. The deceleration phase is a braking mode and produces some electric power called regenerated brake power owing to inertia force for the train generated In the traction and coasting phases. The regenerative energy can be used by other accelerating trains within a specific range from the train and thereby the power consumptions of train can be reduced. We developed a mixed integer programming model to solve the problem. To validate the suggested model, a computational experiment was conducted using real data from Korea Metropolitan Subway.