Strategic planning with risk control of hydrogen supply chains for vehicle use under uncertainty in operating costs: A case study of Spain

In this paper we present a decision-support tool to address the strategic planning of hydrogen supply chains for vehicle use under uncertainty in the operating costs. Given is a superstructure of alternatives that embeds a set of available technologies to produce, store and deliver hydrogen. The objective of our study is to determine the optimal design of the production distribution network capable of fulfilling a predefined hydrogen demand. The design task is formulated as a multi-scenario mixed-integer linear problem (MILP) that considers the uncertainty associated with the coefficients of the objective function of the model (i.e. operating costs, raw materials prices, etc.). The novelty of the approach presented is that it allows controlling the variation of the economic performance of the hydrogen network in the space of uncertain parameters. This is accomplished by using a risk metric that is appended to the objective function as an additional criterion to be optimized. An efficient decomposition method is also presented in order to expedite the solution of the underlying multi-objective model by exploiting its specific structure. The capabilities of the proposed modeling framework and solution strategy are illustrated through the application to a real case study based on Spain, for which valuable insights are obtained. (C) 2010 Professor T. Nejat Veziroglu. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.