Optimisation of railway wheel profiles using a genetic algorithm

This paper presents the procedures and preliminary results of a novel method for designing wheel profiles for railway vehicles using a genetic algorithm. Two existing wheel profiles are chosen as parents and genes are formed to represent these profiles. These genes are mated to produce offspring genes and then reconstructed into profiles that have random combinations of the properties of the parents. Each of the offspring profiles are evaluated by running a computer simulation of the behaviour of a vehicle fitted with these wheel profiles and calculating a penalty index. The inverted penalty index is used as the fitness value in the genetic algorithm. The method has been used to produce optimised wheel…