Seminar: Alternative Fuel Vehicle Evacuation and Refueling Infrastructure Location Planning

Abstract: Climate change exacerbates the frequency and impacts of hazardous events, such as hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires. During emergencies that require preemptive evacuation, drivers using alternative fuel vehicles can be vulnerable under conventional evacuation routes that do not provide access to refueling and charging stations on their way to safety. In this talk, I will discuss a novel evacuation routing problem considering multiple fuel vehicle types. An evacuation tree problem with hop constraints that capture each vehicle fuel type & refueling/charging needs as they are routed to safety is introduced. Large-scale network numerical experiments in South Florida are conducted and planning insights are presented. Even though refueling and charging infrastructure is deployed to meet habitual travel demand, in the second part of my talk I will focus on the extension of the alt-fuel evacuation problem to decide the location of emergency refueling and/or charging infrastructure on the transportation network.

Bio: Dr. Kontou is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on planning sustainable transportation systems. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, focusing on transportation systems, from University of Florida, and holds a M.Sc. from Virginia Tech, and a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in the same field. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Renewable Energy Lab and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Kontou is a 2023 NSF CAREER awardee, a 2023 CUTC-Cambridge Systematics New Faculty Award recipient, a 2022 Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Faculty Scholar, a 2021 US Frontiers of Engineering Invited Participant, and a Levenick Sustainability Teaching Fellow at the University of Illinois. She is a member of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Alternative Transportation Fuels and Technologies and an Associate Editor of the Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment journal.