Refueling Station Location Model to Support Evacuation of Alternative Fuel Vehicles

Abstract

Alternative fuel vehicles may pose challenges to evacuation planning because of their short driving range and the sparse refueling infrastructure existing on transportation networks. Deployment and strategic siting of emergency refueling stations are needed to support the evacuation of alternative fuel vehicles to reach a shelter. This study proposes a location-routing problem with hop constraints that optimize the placement of emergency refueling stations of each alternative fuel type to support evacuation routing. We develop a Benders-inspired decomposition method with a transformed network to solve the location problem and a matheuristic branch-and-price method to design evacuation routes that minimize travel and refueling time and satisfy the hop constraints of each vehicle type. Our numerical experiments, focusing on the South Florida network, uncover the impacts of alternative fuel vehicle specifications and vehicle heterogeneity on the deployment plan.