Designing an optimized fueling infrastructure for a hydrogen railway system

Hydrogen use is increasing in transportation, including within the railway sector. In collaboration with a governmental institution in the Netherlands, we study how to design an efficient hydrogen fueling infrastructure for a railway system. The problem involves selecting yards in a network for hydrogen fueling, assigning trains to these yards, locating hydrogen storage and fueling stations, and connecting them via pipelines. This key planning phase must avoid oversizing costly fueling infrastructure while accounting for track availability at yards and costs due to fueling operations. We formulate this novel problem, which has the structure of a nested facility location problem, as a mixed-integer linear program to minimize total annualized investment and operational costs. Due to the complexity of real-sized instances, we propose a matheuristic that estimates the infrastructural costs for each yard and train assignment by combining a constructive algorithm with a set covering model. It then solves a single-stage facility location problem to select yards and assign trains, followed by a yard-level improvement phase. Numerical experiments on a real Dutch case show that our approach delivers high-quality solutions quickly and offer insights into the optimal infrastructure design depending on the discretization of yard areas, number of trains, and other parameters. • We study the design of an efficient fueling infrastructure for a hydrogen rail network. • It involves selecting yards, allocating trains, locating fuel stations, storage, and pipelines. • We provide a mixed-integer linear program, structured as a nested facility location. • A matheuristic is devised that combines three construction and improvement phases. • We conduct an extensive numerical study based on a real case in the Netherlands.