A Flexible Reformulation of the Refueling Station Location Problem

Serious environmental and economic problems of using fossil fuels in transportation sections force managers to think of alternative fuels such as hydrogen, ethanol, biodiesel, natural gas, or electricity. Meanwhile, lack of fuel network infrastructures is a major problem, which needs to be investigated considering the number and optimal location of alternative fuel stations. In the literature, two different flow-based demand modeling concepts (the maximum cover and set cover) have been proposed for solving this problem. Because of the huge number of combinations of fuel stations for covering the flow of each path, the models are impractical for the real size problems. In this paper, the flow refueling location model was reformulated and a flexible mixed-integer linear programming model was presented, which was able to obtain an optimal solution much faster than the previous set cover version. The model also could be solved in the maximum cover form in a reasonable time on the large-sized networks.