Research Methods on Reducing Power Consumption Through Big Data Analysis in the Railway Field

The aim of this study is to achieve a reduction in power consumption of the Tokaido Shinkansen by deriving the characteristics of operational practices that lead to lower power consumption from a large amount of field data.A method was developed to efficiently calculate and visualize the power consumption using each running data, for understanding the trends in power consumption with respect to travel time.To accurately evaluate operational practices regarding power consumption while eliminating the influence of ambient temperature and occupancy rate, another method was established to correct the effects by those factors on computed power consumption, using an equation that calculates running resistance based on actual running data.Additionally, clustering analyses were performed on notch operations to effectively understand common characteristics from various running patterns for grasping the characteristics that realize a reduction in power consumption.By combining these approaches, it became possible to derive running methods that result in lower power consumption from a large amount of field data.