The development of a future hydrogen energy economy will require the development
of several hydrogen market and industry segments including a hydrogen-based
commercial freight transportation ecosystem. For a sustainable freight
transportation ecosystem, the supporting fueling infrastructure and the
associated vehicle powertrains making use of hydrogen fuel will need to be
co-established. This article introduces the OR-AGENT (Optimal Regional
Architecture Generation for Electrified National Transportation) tool developed
at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has been used to optimize the
hydrogen refueling infrastructure requirements on the I-75 corridor for
heavy-duty (HD) fuel cell electric commercial vehicles (FCEV). This
constraint-based optimization model considers existing fueling locations,
regional-specific vehicle fuel economy and weight, vehicle origin and
destination (O-D), and vehicle volume by class and infrastructure costs to
characterize in-mission refueling requirements for a given freight corridor. The
authors applied this framework to determine the ideal public access locations
for hydrogen refueling (constrained by existing fueling stations), the minimal
viable cost to deploy sufficient hydrogen fuel dispensers, and associated
equipment, to accommodate a growing population of hydrogen fuel cell trucks. The
framework discussed in this article can be expanded and applied to a larger
interstate system, expanded regional corridor, or other transportation network.
This article is the third in a series of papers that defined the model
development to optimize a national hydrogen refueling infrastructure ecosystem
for HD commercial vehicles.
