Evacuation route planning for alternative fuel vehicles

Refueling Station Location Model to Support Evacuation of Alternative Fuel Vehicles

“…Li et al ( 31 ) design a three-stage framework to design an optimal EV mass evacuation plan with existing charging facilities. Purba et al ( 15 ) develop novel evacuation route planning considering the existing refueling stations of alternative fuel vehicles in the network, and highlight the importance of refueling station location in supporting evacuation operations. No other work has modeled the optimal deployment of emergency refueling stations to support evacuation planning in addition to existing refueling stations; our paper aims to bridge this knowledge gap.…”

“…The formulation is structured as a location-routing problem that optimally deploys emergency alternative refueling stations according to demand from alternative fuel vehicles during evacuation. Purba et al ( 15 ) propose the | K | -evacuation tree routes planning problem that designs evacuation tree paths to safety for every k ∈ K alternative fuel vehicle type, considering their alternative fuel vehicle driving range limitations and refueling requirements during evacuation. The designated routes have five desirable evacuation attributes: fast and seamless routing, contraflow traffic control, evacuation routes with access to refueling stations, and multiple evacuation route plans that meet these attributes for all fuel types.…”

“…In real-world evacuation cases, there may be multiple shelters. Following Purba et al ( 15 ), we handle multiple shelter nodes by creating a dummy node (“super shelter” node) that serves as s , and each existing shelter node will be directly connected to s with an arc of zero travel time and infinite capacity. A subset of network nodes may host refueling infrastructure.…”

“…We define r c k as the refueling rate of refueling station of type k . Following Purba et al ( 15 ), the refueling rate is constant for each fuel type. In a real-world application, each vehicle fuel type could have several station types (e.g., for EVs there are different power levels: charging station L1, L2, and DCFC) and each station specification has a unique refueling rate.…”

“…Strategically placing alternative refueling stations can help reduce the vulnerability of alternative fuel vehicle owners and improve their evacuation clearance times before imminent disasters ( 10 , 15 ). The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency ( 14 ) and Federal Highway Administration ( 16 ) suggest evacuating vehicles through respite sites with gasoline stations; however, there is no provision for refueling alternative fuel vehicles.…”