Abstract
Planning a cable railway is a complex task. One has to take into account many aspects and an optimal solution is not well defined. The calculation of the cable configurations for given support positions, cable pretension and cable types however is rather formalizable and presents a direct problem. In this research work we study the first steps to solve the inverse problem: computation of optimal support positions for a given support cable type and cable car mass. We define an appropriate cost functional (objective function) with several constraints and use numerical minimization strategies to obtain optimal solutions.