Determining Optimal Number and Locations of Alternative-Fuel Stations with a Multi-Criteria Approach

The transition to alternative fuels is obligatory because of the lack of enough fossil fuels and their rising prices. However, the transition cannot be done unless sufficient infrastructuresexist. A very important infrastructure is fueling station. Since establishing alt-fuel stations costs very much, a state-of-the-artmethod is proposed in this research to mathematically formulate the problem of optimal location of initial alt-fuel stations regarding their costs. The proposed model considers criteria ofboth p-median model and FRLM (Bow refueling location model) which are the most common mathematical models in theliterature for such a problem. NPV (net present value) technique of engineering economy helps the model find the initial required number of stations. The mathematical formulation is coded in GAMS software and some small-scale instances are solved to test whether the model is proper. The results show that using heuristic or meta-heuristic algorithms for solving the problem is reasonable

کلیدواژه ها:

continuous location problem ، multi-criteria decision making ، alternative-fuel stations ، net present value