Optimization of Compressed Natural Gas Refueling Station Distribution: Swiss Case Studies

For a successful transition from today's status as niche market product to a mass-market product compressed natural gas (cng) cars need a dense compressed natural gas refueling station network. In the next few years, the number of cng refueling stations in Switzerland will most likely be increased from today’s 50 up to 350 in 2020 in several steps by the natural gas industry. Therefore 300 out of the existing 3470 petrol filling stations have to be chosen for this investment, preferably at lowest possible social cost. This leads to an optimization problem with about 10300 possible different distributions of these 300 cng filling stations. The paper reports and discusses solutions for this problem employing the Simulated Annealing heuristic and appropriate objective functions. In the first case study the objective function uses aggregated data based on the locations of the existing gas stations and municipalities. The second case employs an objective function which approximates the social costs for a specific distribution of cng refueling stations. The approach models the response of the car owners to the distribution by predicting the resulting number of cng cars in each municipality with a multinomial logit model, calibrated to current Swiss ownership patterns.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Axhausen, Kay W
  • Frick, Martin, A.
  • Carle, Gian
  • Wokaun, Alexander
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 85th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2006-1-22 to 2006-1-26
• Date: 2006

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 23p
• Monograph Title: TRB 85th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers CD-ROM

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Alternate fuels; Clean fuels; Compressed natural gas; Fuel conservation; Fuel consumption; Fuel gas; Fuel pumps; Refueling; Social impacts
• Geographic Terms: Switzerland
• Subject Areas: Energy; Highways; Vehicles and Equipment; I90: Vehicles; I96: Vehicle Operating Costs;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01025987
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 06-1066
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Jun 28 2006 8:47AM