With the increasing demands on making railway systems more environmentally friendly, diesel railcars have been replaced by hybrid electric railway vehicles. A hybrid system holds a number of advantages as it has the possibility of recuperating energy and allows the internal combustion engine (ICE) to be run at optimal efficiency. However, to fully utilise the advantages of a hybrid system the hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) is highly dependent on the used energy management strategy (EMS). In this thesis, the possibility of minimising the fuel consumption of the series hybrid electric railway vehicle, Ki-Ha E200, has been studied. This has been done by replacing the currently used EMS, based on heuristics, with a model predictive controller (MPC). The heuristic EMS and the MPC have been evaluated by comparing the performance results from three different test cases. The performance of the implemented MPC seems promising as it yields more optimal operation of the ICE and improved control of the battery state of charge (SOC).

La production de la circulation ferroviaire nécessite l’utilisation et le partage deressources critiques et hétérogènes, notamment le réseau ferroviaire et lesressources roulantes et humaines. Un schéma communément adopté décompose laplanification selon les niveaux décisionnels et les ressources.Depuis les dernières années, les acteurs ferroviaires accordent un intérêt croissant àla robustesse de la circulation ferroviaire. Néanmoins, toutes les stratégies étudiéesse concentrent sur une seule ressource à la fois, négligeant ainsi le partage desressources et son impact sur la robustesse. Or, la séquentialité de la planificationdes ressources peut augmenter la propagation des retards sur les autres trains.L’intégration des décisions tactiques des trois ressources infrastructure, engins etagents de conduite peut aboutir à un plan de transport plus robuste dans le sens dela propagation des retards. Les motivations principales de la thèse émanent de cetteidée.L’objectif de ce travail est d’aboutir à des outils d’aide à la décision pour proposerune planification intégrée et robuste des ressources ferroviaires au niveau tactique.Nous proposons dans cette thèse plusieurs contributions :1. Un modèle d’optimisation qui vise à élaborer un plan de transport robuste destrois ressources critiques simultanément.2. Un modèle de simulation à événements discrets pour évaluer la robustesse desplans de transport. Nous tentons dans cette phase de reproduire le comportementréel du système ferroviaire et l’utilisation des trois ressources critiques. / The railway operations' planning consists in finding the best use of the available infrastructure, rollingstock and crew units to cover a given timetable. A commonly adopted scheme breaks down planningas decision-making levels and resources.However, the occurrence of perturbations may deteriorate the quality of the solutions or even makethem infeasible. Therefore, railway operators aim to find robust schedules that minimize the impact ofperturbations. To this purpose, the decisions made for each resource (infrastructure, rolling stock andcrew) must include the demand cover as well as the robustness objectives.Nevertheless, all tested strategies focus on a single resource at a time, neglecting resource sharing andits impact on the robustness. But the sequential scheme of resource planning can increase thepropagation delays on other trains. Integrating of tactical decisions of the three resourcesinfrastructure, rolling stock and crew can result in a more robust schedule that minimizes thepropagation of delays. The main motivations of the thesis come from this idea.The objective of this work is to develop decision support tools that provide an integrated and robustplanning of railway resources at the tactical level. We propose in this thesis several contributions:1. An optimization model that aims to develop a robust transport plan of the three critical resourcessimultaneously.2. A simulation model (discrete event) to assess the robustness of transport plans. We are trying at thisstage to reproduce the actual behavior of the rail system and the use of three critical resources.

Accidents involving passenger trains happen regularly in India. The reasons for such accidents could be many; such as weather and flooding, faulty tracks, bridge collapse, collisions caused by signaling errors, mechanical failures, driver error, sabotage etc. The annual accident-related deaths as a percentage of the total number of passengers carried by Indian Railway may seem to be negligible, but the aim should be to achieve zero fatality as every single person killed is an irreplaceable loss to his/her family. It needs to be mentioned that in addition to fatalities for which exact numbers are not available, serious injuries and permanent disabilities caused by train accidents in India at present stand completely unaccounted for. In the absence of a large scale renovation and crash avoidance measures coupled with the propensity to increase the number of trains every year, enhancing passive safety is crucial i.e. crashworthiness and occupant safety of passenger coaches of Indian trains. In the current work, crashworthiness and occupant safety of the existing typical three-tier cabin passenger coach of Indian Railway in an event of collision accident are assessed with the aid of a finite element analysis. In the light of the published work on research in railroad equipment crashworthiness, the current work is intended to envisage the methodology to assess the Indian Railway passenger coach from the point of view of the crashworthiness and occupant safety using CAE (Computer aided engineering) based approach. It is involved with an extensive study of the structural crush behavior of an individual passenger coach car and its effect on the interaction between occupants and the coach interior. Here the structural crush behavior of a typical three-tier cabin passenger coach is evaluated for the head-on impact against a fixed and rigid barrier. The occupant response for the same scenario is also studied which can be viewed as a component of the actual occupant response due to the structural crush behavior of the passenger coach. This can give useful estimates of injury severity and fatalities that may occur in actual accidents. An FE model of the passenger coach structure was built and validated using International Railway Union (UIC) specified code OR 567-design requirements in terms of static loads constituting structural proof cases. These proof cases specify the static load values the coach body structure should withstand without any permanent deformation or failure when applied at the specified locations on the structural ends across the longitudinal axis. In addition, a favorable correlation between the simulation and actual experiment for drop impact behavior of the open section specimens, namely C-section and I-section, was obtained to validate the simulation methodology. LS-DYNA a nonlinear dynamic explicit FE solver was used to carry out all the dynamic impact simulations involved in the current work. The material modeling takes into account the strain rate effect which is essential for the material impact behavior study. The contact modeling was done using penalty contact method. The degrading effect of the buffer on the structural crush patterns which induced the undesirable global bending and jackknifing of the whole coach structure was demonstrated with the help of dynamic impact simulations of the coach structure. The quantification of occupant injury was done by occupant safety simulations using the Hybrid III 50th percentile male dummy FE model. The dummy having been designed for simulating automobile accident scenarios, its contacts had to be adapted to suit the excessive mobility conditions in the coach interior. The dummy was revalidated successfully for the head drop test, pendulum chest impact test, neck flexion and extension test and knee impact test. Impact simulations for three different speeds were performed by positioning the dummy close to the impact point. Injury criteria such as Head Injury Criterion, Chest Deceleration, Knee force level and Neck extension-flexion moments were used to estimate the injury severity level and fatality rate.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse and clarify contemporary stage of the process of integration and liberalisation on the European railway market mentioning the situation in chosen member states of the European union. It also focuses on finding the answer to the question, what are the necessary steps to achieve maximum effectivity in the european railway services. This topic analyses both the European union and the states.

Investigation of potential implementation of low-cost business model in passenger railway transportation. Analysis of techniques used in different industries and evaluation of potential of such techniques.

The purpose of this thesis is charting and analyzing railway services integrated to Prague's public transportation system. Its current integration and effiency will be evaluated based on a study of professional literature and after that, changes and optimizations will be proposed in order to increase the transportation quality. "I'm looking towards inspiration from foreign train lines as well as with opinions of travelers and commuters.

In my diploma thesis I engage in liberalisation process of rail transport, its effect of increasing the quality level of transport and I examine the legislative framework relating to rail transport which is related to European Union or to domestic market in the Czech Republic. I further examine the impact of liberalisation has had in Great Britain and Germany. In the practical part of this diploma thesis I deal with the analysis of private rail operators who are licenced to operate passenger rail transport. Primarily trying to determine the operators who express interest in operating scheduled passenger rail and thus making efforts to break the current strong dominant position of Czech Railways.

Main topic of this thesis is mapping of competition between rail and air transport. The first goal is to find out, which of these two types of transport is preferable for the customer, if he has the opportunity to select plane or train. To reach this goal is chosen 15 connections between cities and on these connections is rail and air transport compared in terms of price and total travel time. The second goal is to research the behavior and decision-making of customers, who use rail and air transport.

The development of station design provided new dimensions to both the sense and sensation of space. This is to be recaptured in the design of the museum, which requires obtaining an understanding of the influence, implications and impact railway stations and their supporting infrastructure had on architecture, the cityscape and the urban fabric, due to their large size, area and enclosed volume. Station design has contributed to modern design through the need to satisfy the uninterrupted, free-space enclosure of large volumes, necessitating progress in the knowledge of the structural application of the new materials discovered during the Industrial Revolution from which the modern architect is still benefiting. The impact of stations in these three mentioned fields furthermore had an indirect impact on society. The determination of all these influences by stations and their design will form the research subject of this dissertation. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Architecture / unrestricted

Orientador: Valdir Alves Guimarães / Banca: Aelcio Zangrandi / Banca: Marcos Venicius Soares Pereira / Resumo: Atualmente a crescente necessidade de aumento da carga por eixo e do número de passageiros transportados pelos trens, fez com que as ferrovias em todo o mundo iniciassem pesquisas voltadas para o desenvolvimento de novos materiais e processamentos térmicos. O aumento da confiabilidade dos sistemas ferroviários é uma exigência do mercado, o que é definido como sendo a garantia de que não ocorra falhas nos componentes no período entre as inspeções de rotina, ou seja, que um defeito possa ser detectado e reparado antes que atinja um tamanho crítico que leve a ruptura do componente. Por se tratar de um equipamento fundamental nos trens, os eixos ferroviários são alvos de grande parte das recentes pesquisas na área de fadiga, desenvolvimento de novos materiais e segurança dos intervalos de inspeção, uma vez que sua falha, certamente ocasionará um descarrilamento do vagão ou locomotiva. O comportamento em fadiga dos materiais empregados na fabricação de eixos ferroviários vem sendo estudado através de ensaios de propagação de trinca por fadiga, a fim de se obter dados experimentais para definição de intervalos de inspeção. Neste trabalho, foram estudados os aços SAE-1050, comumente utilizado na fabricação de eixos ferroviários, e o SAE- 4130, que recentemente vem sendo empregado para este fim. Estes materiais foram processados por dois diferentes tipos de tratamentos térmicos, sendo um composto por normalização e alívio de tensões, e o outro por normalização, têmpera e revenimento. O comportamento mecânico dos aços foi avaliado através de ensaios de tração, charpy em diversas temperaturas e tenacidade à fratura ( IC K ). O comportamento em fadiga, por sua vez, foi avaliado através de ensaios de propagação de trinca por fadiga, realizados em corpos de prova tração compacto (CT). Para a determinação da influência da razão... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Currently the growing need of increase in axle load and numbers of passengers transported by the trains, prompted the railroads all over the world began researches about the development of new materials and heat treatments. The increase of the reliability for railway systems is a requirement of the market, and can be defined as the warranty that doesn't occur failures in the components between the inspection intervals, in other words, that a defect can be detected and repaired before it reaches a critical size to take the rupture of the component. Axles are one of the most important components in railway vehicle, thus are present in the great part of the recent researches into fatigue, new materials and safe inspection intervals, since its flaw, certainly will cause a derailment of the wagon or locomotive. The fatigue behavior of the employed materials in the production of railway axles has been studied with aid of fatigue crack growth tests, in order to obtain experimental data for definition of inspection intervals. The present work, studied the steels SAE-1050, commonly used in the production of railway axles, and SAE-4130, that recently has been used for this application. These materials were submitted to different heat treatments: normalizing and stress relief, and normalizing, quenching and tempering. The mechanical properties of the steels were evaluated through tensile test, impact test in different temperatures and fracture toughness test. The fatigue behavior was evaluated through of fatigue crack growth tests in compact tension specimens (CT). The influence of the load ratio " R ", on fatigue crack growth was evaluated using the ratio of 0,1 and 0,3. The results showed that the steel SAE-4130, normalized, quenched and tempered, achieved the best mechanical properties and the smallest fatigue crack growth rate, being therefore, the best option as... (Complete abstract click electronic acccess below) / Mestre