Up to now, transport systems have mainly been designed by considering time–efficiency, mobility and safety criteria. Today hard constraints on resources savings and environment preservation have to be taken into account at the different phases of design, maintenance and operation of these networks. This study, focused on the operation phase, aimed to provide a common framework for rail and roads energy consumption assessment. For that, the influence of infrastructure characteristics on energy consumption of vehicles was assessed, in a optimization perspective. A method for energy consumptions evaluation by exploiting contact forces models was proposed. Two models were developed, for a road and for a railway, and validated with experimental data of a vehicle on a test track and full–scale measurement of a high speed train on a given line. At last, numerical simulations are worked out with the validated models to exhibit the influence of successions of uphill and downhill on energy consumptions. These simple mechanical models pointed out the differences of the two transportation systems, in terms of developed contact forces and consumed energy.

energy consumption, roads, railways, vehicle model, full scale tests