Optimizing the process of designing and calculating railway catenary support infrastructure using a high-productivity computational tool

The process of designing and calculating railway catenary infrastructure, as the way it is carried out currently, is very complex and time consuming. It is necessary expert knowledge of different fields, like design and structural calculus, technical security, legal normative, topography, etc. This process consists of several stages aimed at choosing a design, checking requirements, and calculating structural feasibility, so the communication among the experts may be quite slow. In order to reduce time and effort invested in this process, we propose a system that allows to automate its stages and tasks. Our system provides a valid solution per structure, that complies with design and structural constraints, and with existing railway regulations. The proposed system has been integrated in a high-productivity software tool, that avoids human mistakes due to hand-calculation, allows users a fast design and calculation, and exploits the ability of current computers to run tasks concurrently so as to speed up the process. The computational performance and complexity of the tool, as well as statistics values, are analysed by designing and calculating up to 2048 heterogeneous support structures. Besides, the tool is evaluated through a study case based on a real railway route, obtaining an overall improvement of 82.33% in time invested over the existing process.

► We describe the current complex process of designing railway catenary infrastructure.
► We propose a system that allows to automate the steps and tasks of the process.
► Our system provides a valid solution per each structure of the infrastructure.
► The proposed system is integrated in a tool that allows users a fast design.
► Time invested is measured and compared, obtaining an improvement with our tool.