Affiliations: Computer Science and Engineering Department, University Carlos III of Madrid, Leganés, Spain
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Jesús Carretero, Computer Science and Engineering Dep. University Carlos III of Madrid, Avda. Universidad 30, Leganes, Madrid 28911, Spain. Tel.: +34 916249458; Fax: +34 916249129; E-mail:[email protected]http://arcos.inf.uc3m.es/carrete
Abstract: Nowadays, railway infrastructure designers rely heavily
on computer simulators and expert systems to model, analyze and evaluate
potential deployments prior to their installation. This paper presents the
railway power consumption simulator model (RPCS), a cloud-based model for the design, simulation and evaluation
of railway electric infrastructures. This model integrates the parameters of
an infrastructure within a search engine that generates and evaluates a set
of simulations to achieve optimal designs, according to a given set of
objectives and restrictions. The knowledge of the domain is represented as
an ontology that translates the elements in the infrastructure into an
electric circuit, which is simulated to obtain a wide range of electric
metrics. In order to support the execution of thousands of scenarios in a
scalable, efficient and fault-tolerant manner, this paper introduces an
architecture to deploy the model in a cloud environment, and a dimensioning
model to find the types and number of instances that maximize performance
while minimizing the externalization costs. The resulting model is applied
to a particular case study, allowing the execution of over one thousand
concurrent experiments in a virtual cluster on the Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud.
Keywords: Railway electric provisioning, infrastructure optimization, simulation model, cloud computing
