US team delivers open-source rail freight decarbonisation tool

ALTRIOS, the Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimisation System, was developed by a multi-partner consortium made up of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign RailTec, and BNSF Railway.

The open-source software provides a physics-based simulation of individual trains and real-world rail infrastructure to assess various decarbonisation technologies including hydrogen, biofuels and batteries. According to SwRI, ALTRIOS can simulate the real-world impacts and expenses related to adopting alternative propulsion technologies as well as the additional infrastructure associated with them.

“The Class-I North American railroads have already committed to reducing their GHG emissions by setting science-based carbon reduction targets,” said Garrett Anderson, a lead engineer in SwRI’s Powertrain Engineering Division. “Railroads are using fuel efficiency, renewable fuels and alternate propulsion approaches to achieve the goal. ALTRIOS can cost-effectively assess locomotive decarbonisation approaches using computer modelling to help them choose the right technologies for their needs.”

The $1.5m project was funded by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E) as part of the LOCOMOTIVES (Lowering CO₂: Models to Optimise Train Infrastructure, Vehicles and Energy Storage) programme. Transportation accounts for around a third of the US’s total emissions, with the government targeting 2050 for the sector to hit net zero. According to the ALTRIOS team, the largest freight railroads in North America are aiming to reduce GHG emissions by 40 per cent within the next decade, but fully decarbonising a rail network that straddles an entire continent will inevitably take longer.

"Decarbonisation won't happen overnight,” said Jason Lustbader, a commercial vehicle electrification researcher at NREL and the project's principal investigator. “So ALTRIOS doesn't just illustrate near-term decarbonisation strategies. It allows us to scale the strategy over time so that, as clean locomotive technologies advance, rail companies can plan to integrate those into their operations and understand the implications for their service.”

NREL researchers have already begun to use ALTRIOS to develop real-world decarbonisation strategies. In its first deployment, they demonstrated that adding battery-electric locomotives on a BNSF taconite-hauling route could reduce the railway's greenhouse gas emissions. While the tool was developed primarily for freight, Lustbader said ALTRIOS can also be applied to the passenger rail space. He said the tool’s modelling capabilities are able to encompass granular details such as equity and environmental justice concerns, including things like air quality in historically disadvantaged neighbourhoods near freight hubs.

ALTRIOS is publicly available for download under an open-source license and is compatible with Windows, MAC OS and Linux. More information can be found at https://www.nrel.gov/transportation/altrios.html.