Spatio-Temporal Model to Evaluate Mobile Service Stations in Terms of Accessibility

Abstract

Recently many gas stations in Japan have closed down due to the aging society, eco-cars, price competition and so on. More hydrogen stations for Fuel Cell Vehicles, on the other hand, are needed in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the environment. The purpose of this paper is to examine how mobile service stations improve accessibility in a linear market, where service stations are frequented on trips associated with origins and destinations. We derive the upper and lower bounds of detour distances for mobile stations using a rectilinear Voronoi diagram in two-dimensional space. Then we compare two different mobile station visiting schemes by devising spatio-temporal scheduling for uniformly and independently distributed origins and destinations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the mobile station could significantly improve user accessibility compared to that of fixed service stations.