Development of Hydrogen Fueling Infrastructures in the Northeastern United States

摘要

In this paper, a newly developed optimization model is used to find the locations of the hydrogen refueling infrastructures in the Northeastern United States. A complete plan will provide a coverage network within and connect the metropolitan areas. The presented new model seeks an allocation of demands, congestion and the number of servers while maintains a certain level of service quality, indicated by the number of waiting vehicles. The throughput of each station is expressed by both the congestion and the number of servers of the stations using the clearing functions. A Geographical Information System (GIS) is used to calculate the demands based on the U.S. census tract information and formulates the demands as a function of potential hydrogen fuel cell drivers in the metropolitan areas of Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and New York City. The potential locations of the hydrogen refueling stations are identified based on the local demands and highway proximately through the GIS analysis. The presented optimization model which uses the extracted data form the GIS analysis is applied to find the location of the refueling stations, the assigned demands, the number of servers and the number of waiting vehicles of each refueling station. Finally, a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model is built to test the performance of the optimization model results within a year after construction of the stations and the refueling network in terms of utilization rate and the average number of waiting vehicles per day.