Experimental validation of a steady-state metro network simulator for eco-drive operations

In this paper, we propose a validation procedure of energy consumption patterns implemented in a steady-state railway system software simulator by using experimental measured data. The software tool is able to evaluate the energy supplied by the feeding line to move a metro vehicle implementing different speed profiles. In particular, we suggest a simply methodology aimed to calibrate the metro system models by minimizing the mean squared error (MSE) between the estimate values of the model parameters and the real ones. The optimization problem we formulated, takes into account the equality constraints between the measured energy consumption at specific instants, and that computed by the software simulator. The effectiveness of this energy validation procedure is showed on a real case study comparing the energy consumption of metro vehicle implementing eco-drive speed profiles. The encouraging results are presented and discussed.