Aggregate Influence

Modeling the Transition to a Hydrogen-based Personal Transportation System

Craig H. Stephan, Matthew Mahalik, Thomas Veselka, and Guenter Conzelmann

Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA

In the 2005 Frontiers in Transportation conference, Stephan and Sullivan reported on an agent-based model that describes how a personal transportation system might transition from one based on petroleum to one based on hydrogen. This transition is more difficult than ones substituting, for example, diesel fuel or ethanol for gasoline (petrol), in the first case because no supply infrastructure presently exists and in the second because “flex fuel” vehicles that can operate on either hydrogen or gasoline are not feasible. In essence, it presents a classic “chicken and egg” problem: drivers will not purchase hydrogen vehicles in the absence of a supporting infrastructure, and fuel station owners will hesitate to invest in hydrogen generating and dispensing equipment without an assured market. The earlier paper used a grid of roads along which drivers drove either conventional or hydrogen vehicles. In having to purchase fuel far from their homes or work locations the owners, or potential owners, of hydrogen vehicles were subjected to inconvenience, and in not quickly finding a hydrogen supply station as their fuel ran low they suffered worry.

In this paper we extend the previous model in several ways. First, rather than a rectilinear grid of roads, we use the road topology of a real metropolitan area, the Los Angeles basin. Second, while in the earlier model a hydrogen dispensing station was added whenever traffic past a given location reached a threshold value, in the present model station agents attempt to plan their investments based on imperfect knowledge of driver fueling behavior, the expected penetration of hydrogen, the plans of competitors, and the amount of fuel they estimate will be dispensed. In addition, the driver agents are more complex. They vary in their income and live and work in areas corresponding to that income based on demographic data. They have attributes such as “greenness” – their willingness to pay more or suffer more inconvenience to operate a vehicle that has desirable environmental characteristics. They are influenced in their purchase decisions not only by their personal experience and a general “belief space” reflecting the attitude of society in general towards hydrogen, but also by interactions with their peer groups – neighbors, coworkers, and others of corresponding “greenness” and/or income. We examine how a transition to hydrogen succeeds or fails as these various attributes are varied and given greater or lesser influence.

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