A Review on Energy Efficiency in Three Transportation Sectors: Railways, Electrical Vehicles and Marine

Abstract

The present paper is a review on efficiency issues related to three important sectors of the transportation systems: railways, electrical vehicles, and marine. For the three sectors, the authors, in reference of their knowledge and research area, show the results of a wide literature analysis, in order to highlight which are the measures, in terms of technological solutions and management techniques, which are recently investigated and implemented, for improving the three transportation systems, from the point of view of efficiency. In particular, for the railway transportation sector, a wide analysis is presented, detecting which are the main measures adopted for improving the efficiency, related to the power systems for supplying trains and to the train traffic control, with a focus on the storage system integration. For electric road vehicles the analysis is focused on the plug-in electrical vehicles and on the infrastructure for their recharge, with an emphasis on how these vehicles can support the grid, e.g., through Vehicle to Grid (V2G) applications. Finally, for the marine transport service the review is related to the propulsion systems and on how the different solutions can meet the objective of efficiency.