  Railway transportation is one of the most popular options for Urban Massive
Transportation Systems (UMTS) because of many attractive features. A robust
electric power supply is essential to enable normal operation. However, the
power peaks appearing at the start time of the vehicles put heavy pressure on
the power grid. Reduction of the power peak is a key issue in improving urban
railway transit's power efficiency. Researchers have tried to address this
problem by making a delicate timetable, but this method often failed to serve
the purpose because of the punctuality problem. In this work, taking advantage
of real-time estimation of the single train's power consumption, an online
Power peak Reduction by real-time Scheduling (PReS) solution for trains'
departure is proposed. Particularly, a Binary Integer Programming (BIP) model
is introduced that is able to avoid power consumption peak caused by multiple
trains departure simultaneously. The simulation result verified that the
proposed real-time scheduling approach can effectively reduce the occurrences
of power peak without bringing in additional train travel delay.
