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Abstract: 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The design of overhead knuckle junctions in railway electrification is a crucial and complex problem. Non-optimal overhead knuckle junction designs cause limitations in train speed and, most important, malfunctions and breakages. Most railway companies have regulations for the design of overhead knuckle junctions. Those regulations have been defined by the experience, but, as far as we know, there are no computerized software tools to help with the task of designing and testing optimal solutions for overhead knuckle junctions. In this paper we present a simulator that allows to look for optimal configurations of overhead knuckle junctions. The simulator starts from a model based on the description of the problem that includes all the significant elements that may affect the design process, in order to find an optimal solution in terms of reliability and safety. The obtained design will be the more reliable to face failures, such as excessive wire and pantograph wears, wrong geometry configurations of the catenary, or electricity supply notches. The simulator also allows to evaluate current designs, so as to prove their possible flaws. This paper describes the simulation algorithm developed, the input data needed to define the experiments, and the achieved results. As the simulator requires heavy computational resources, high productivity parallel issues have been included in the implementation to exploit current multi-core processors. The validation and performance evaluations were made in the paper through the simulation of overhead knuckle junction designs over real switches. Their analysis will show the feasibility and applicability of our simulator. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]