A Continuous Approach to Alternative Fuel Station Location for Dedicated Route Networks

Abstract

This study addresses the continuous deviation-flow refueling station location problem. We consider a set of routes that can be used by public transportation vehicles and dedicated distribution fleets in a general network. The objective is to optimally locate alternative fuel refueling stations in the network to serve these dedicated vehicles. Deviations from the prescribed routes for refueling purposes are allowed, however, the deviation distance is bounded to ensure acceptable levels of efficiency, vehicle utilization, and passenger convenience. Unlike most related literature, our approach considers all points in the network as candidate refueling station locations. We derive coverage constraints that must be satisfied for any candidate location to serve the vehicles traveling on a given route. Then we develop an exact algorithm to establish a finite dominating set of candidate locations guaranteed to include an optimal solution to the problem. A mathematical model is proposed to find an optimal set of candidate locations for establishing alternative fuel refueling stations. Finally, a realistic numerical experiment is conducted to illustrate the proposed approach. This experiment shows that our approach can be used to find various alternative optimal solutions, which helps decision-makers to consider factors other than maximum coverage when locating refueling stations such as land prices and accessibility.