A Flexible System-level Hydrogen Transportation System Operating Structure Interacting with Urban Transportation System

Abstract

Electrification of hard-to-abate sectors through green hydrogen is a promising strategy for achieving the Paris Agreement's decarbonization targets. However, hydrogen transportation problem remains a pressing concern in a system-level operation of hydrogen energy system (HES) in an integrated electric power and hydrogen system (IPHS). This paper presents a system-level operation structure for hydrogen transportation system (HTS). Proposed structure is intended to facilitate the coordination between HTS and the remaining parts of an IPHS by using a decomposed operation structure, which allows for different timescales to be set for each party. In the proposed structure, hydrogen tube trailers (HTs) are used to deliver hydrogen across the urban transportation system (UTS) using an extended version of a vehicle routing problem (VRP) coupled with a new set of constraints for incorporating the traffic density of roads and their availability. Furthermore, certain constraints have been considered to align with the priority of supplying sensitive loads. As part of the proposed HTS operating structure, a trade-off between system reliability and cost-affordability is also managed by assigning the adjustable weights to each parties' representative in HTS operating objective. The proposed structure is intended to minimize the operating costs of HTS in an interaction with IPHS as well as minimize the delay costs as a penalty in the event of hydrogen load loss. The proposed HTS operating structure is formulated in the form of a mixed integer linear problem and is then solved by Gurobi solver using YALMIP toolbox in MATLAB.