Strategic hydrogen refueling station locations with scheduling and routing considerations of individual vehicles

Ahydrogen refueling station siting model that considers scheduling and routing decisions of individual vehicles is presented. By coupling a location strategy of the set covering problem (SCP) and a routing and scheduling strategy of the household activity pattern problem, this problem falls into the category of location routing problems. It introduces a tour-based approach to refueling station siting, with tour-construction capability within the model. There are multiple decision makers in this problem: the public sector as the service provider and the collection of individual households that make their own routing decisions to perform a given set of out-of-home activities together with a visit to a refueling location. A solution method that does not require the full information of the coverage matrix is developed to reduce the computational burden. Compared to the point-based SCP the results indicate that the minimum infrastructure requirement may be overestimated when vehicle (refueling demand)-infrastructure (refueling supply) interactions with daily out-of-home activities are excluded.