Extensions of Flow-Capturing Models for Refueling Alternative Fuel Vehicles

对许多人来说，我们依赖石油带来的环境、经济和政治代价正变得越来越明显。在轿车和卡车上广泛使用替代燃料的主要障碍之一是这些车辆的续航里程有限，以及在方便的地点缺乏加油设施。解决加油站选址问题的传统方法将问题定义为将用户到达加油站所需行驶的距离最小化。从Hodgson(1990)开始，几位研究人员一直在开发一种新的加油站选址方法，试图使经过加油站的交通流量最大化。该项目将流动捕获模型扩展到氢燃料电池等替代燃料汽车的加油设施的选址。替代燃料汽车的续航里程通常比传统汽车的续航里程小得多。因此，发展适当基础设施的艰巨而昂贵的任务比往常更具挑战性。一种优化加油站位置的模型，可以帮助克服替代燃料的障碍，以在固定数量的加油站中捕获尽可能多的交通。因此，该项目对选址建模领域和国家能源政策都具有重要意义。

The environmental, economic and political costs of our reliance on oil are becoming increasingly clear to many people. One of the main obstacles to widespread use of alternative fuels in cars and trucks is the limited range of these vehicles and the scarcity of refueling facilities in convenient locations. Traditional approaches to the question of where gas stations should sited define the problem in terms of minimizing some measure of the distance users need to travel to get to the fueling site. Beginning with Hodgson (1990), several researchers have been developing a new approach to the siting of fuel stations that attempts to maximize the flow of traffic past a site. This project extend flow-capturing models to apply to the location of refueling facilities for alternative-fuel vehicles, such as hydrogen fuel cells. The range of alternatively-fueled vehicles is typically much smaller than the range conventional vehicles. Thus, the difficult and expensive task of developing an adequate infrastructure is even more challenging than usual. A model for optimally locating refueling stations to capture as much traffic as possible with a fixed number of stations could help overcome the barriers to alternative fuel. Thus, this project has significance both to the location-modeling field and to national energy policy.