An Alternative Fuel Refueling Station Location Model considering Detour Traffic Flows on a Highway Road System

Seong Wook Hwang,Sang Jin Kweon,Jose A Ventura

doi:10.1155/2020/9473831

Abstract

With the development of alternative fuel (AF) vehicle technologies, studies on finding the potential location of AF refueling stations in transportation networks have received considerable attention. Due to the strong limited driving range, AF vehicles for long-distance intercity trips may require multiple refueling stops at different locations on the way to their destination, which makes the AF refueling station location problem more challenging. In this paper, we consider that AF vehicles requiring multiple refueling stops at different locations during their long-distance intercity trips are capable of making detours from their preplanned paths and selecting return paths that may be different from original paths for their round trips whenever AF refueling stations are not available along the preplanned paths. These options mostly need to be considered when an AF refueling infrastructure is not fully developed on a highway system. To this end, we first propose an algorithm to generate alternative paths that may provide the multiple AF refueling stops between all origin/destination (OD) vertices. Then, a new mixed-integer programming model is proposed to locate AF refueling stations within a preselected set of candidate sites on a directed transportation network by maximizing the coverage of traffic flows along multiple paths. We first test our mathematical model with the proposed algorithm on a classical 25-vertex network with 25 candidate sites through various scenarios that consider a different number of paths for each OD pair, deviation factors, and limited driving ranges of vehicles. Then, we apply our proposed model to locate liquefied natural gas refueling stations in the state of Pennsylvania considering the construction budget. Our results show that the number of alternative paths and deviation distance available significantly affect the coverage of traffic flows at the stations as well as computational time.

Highlights

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the transportation sector is one of the most vital steps in fighting against global warming in the United States (U.S.)
Comparing with the literature listed above, we shortly provide the main distinctions of our research work over the existing studies as follows: (i) Our problem is an extension of Hwang et al [6] problem to consider potential deviation paths on directed transportation networks, such as highway network systems. is leads to consider (1) the mixed set of single-access and dual-access candidate sites to locate alternative fuel (AF) refueling stations, and (2) nonsymmetric round trips between ODs, where return paths are allowed to be different from original paths for refueling services in both directions
We have considered that, if preplanned paths for each OD pair cannot offer any AF refueling service, alternative paths can be used by AF vehicles to receive refueling service

Summary

Introduction

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the transportation sector is one of the most vital steps in fighting against global warming in the United States (U.S.). In order to cut down tail-pipe emissions in the transportation sector, vehicles using alternative fuel (AF), such as biodiesel, hydrogen, electrical energy, and natural gas, have received significant attention in recent years because they emit less well-to-wheel GHG than that of vehicles using traditional fossil fuels, such as diesel and gasoline. In this table, counties are categorized into three groups according to their population density: mostly urban, mostly rural, and completely rural.

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