Extensions of Flow-Capturing Models for Refueling Alternative Fuel Vehicles

我们对石油的依赖所带来的环境、经济和政治代价对许多人来说越来越明显。 在汽车和卡车中广泛使用替代燃料的主要障碍之一是这些车辆的有限范围和在方便的地点缺乏加油设施。 传统的加油站选址问题的解决方法是将用户到达加油站所需的距离最小化。 从Hodgson（1990）开始，一些研究人员一直在开发一种新的方法来选址加油站，试图最大限度地提高交通流量通过一个网站。 本计画将流量捕捉模式延伸至氢燃料电池等替代燃料车辆之加油设施位置。 替代燃料车辆的行驶里程通常比传统车辆的行驶里程小得多。因此，发展适当的基础设施这一困难和昂贵的任务比以往更具挑战性。 一个最佳定位加油站的模型，以捕获尽可能多的交通与固定数量的站，可以帮助克服障碍，以替代燃料。 因此，该项目对位置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.