Description:

"Evacuation Network Modeling for Alternative Fuel Vehicles and Refueling Infrastructure Deployment"

Eleftheria (Ria) Kontou, Ph.D.

Abstract: As the number of adopted alternative fuel vehicles increases, communities that are susceptible to hazardous events, such as hurricanes, need to create new evacuation plans that account for their refueling needs. During emergencies that require preemptive evacuation, drivers using alternative fuel vehicles are left vulnerable under conventional evacuation routes which do not provide access to refueling stations on their way to shelters. In this talk, I will discuss a novel evacuation routing problem which considers multiple types of fuel vehicles. A  -spanning evacuation tree problem with hop constraints that capture the refueling needs of each vehicle fuel type   as they are routed to a shelter is introduced. The formulation, the solution procedure, as well as a series of numerical experiments are presented. Even though charging infrastructure is usually sited to meet habitual travel demand, in the second part of my talk I will focus on the extension of the electric vehicle evacuation problem to decide the deployment of charging stations on the transportation network.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Kontou is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on sustainable transportation systems planning. She earned her PhD in Civil Engineering, focusing on transportation systems, from University of Florida and holds a MSc from Virginia Tech in the same field. She graduated with a Diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the Transportation and Hydrogen Systems Center of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Alternative Transportation Fuels and Technologies and the Chair of the TRB Young Members Coordinating Council.