Optimal Sizing of Tramway Electrical Infrastructures Using Genetic Algorithms

The increasing electrification of urban public transports requires improving the design of the electrical infrastructures to take into account all the technical and financial challenges involved in the creation of a new line. This paper presents a new optimization tool dedicated to the sizing of tramway electrical infrastructures: power substations, overhead transmission lines, feeders and equipotential bonding. The purpose is to determine the number, positions and technical characteristics of all these components to achieve the best trade-offs between investment costs, energy costs and the quality of the traffic power supply. The sizing problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and solved using the NSGA-II genetic algorithm. The proposed method is applied to a simple test case and gives good results.