Energy-meter data validation in railway via physical models

The railway opening up to competition in Europe is a challenge from the engineering point of view. In energy billing field, this opening asks for a whole new system of energy measurement, as the already installed one is only useful when only one company operates. Even if the European laws impose the installation of energy-meters in new/refurbished rolling-stock since 2015, the chosen configuration doesn’t match the RTE (the French national transmission system operator) defined standards of data reliability. Therefore in this paper, a new procedure for the validation of the data collected by the energy-meter is presented. First the used physical train model is presented, which takes into account the characteristics of the studied train and line. Based on this physical model and different optimization techniques, upper and lower bounds for the total consumption of the train are then defined. These bounds are used to validate the consistency of the data provided by the energy-meters. This data validation technique is tested with real data for a couple of years from a regional passenger train. Finally, a short discussion about the limits of the developed method is presented.