Refueling-station location problem under uncertainty

•The two-stage stochastic refueling location model with and without capacity are proposed.•Permanent and portable stations as the first and second stage decisions are considered.•The portable stations are utilized to provide more flexibility to cover the uncertain flow.•A heuristic algorithm based on the core sets and greedy method is developed.•The models are applying on Arizona network and getting reasonable results.

In this paper, we introduce a two-stage stochastic refueling station location model, where the first stage locates permanent stations and the second locates portable stations. The portable alternative fuel stations are an innovative feature in transportation network. The models are applied to an intercity network for Arizona. Computational results show that the permanent stations locate in and around heavily populated nodes. In addition, the results obtained for the portable stations can be utilized to set up permanent stations when the investor intends to increase the number of such stations. The computational results of the exact and greedy approach are reported.