Using alternative fuel vehicles is one of the ways to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels which have many negative environmental effects. An alternative fuel vehicle needs special planning for its refueling operations because of some reasons, e.g. limited number of refueling stations, uncertain refueling queue times in the stations, variable alternative fuel prices among the stations, etc. I...

We study the combinatorial properties of optimal refueling policies, which specify the transportation paths and the refueling operations along the paths to minimize the total transportation costs between vertices. The insight into the structure of optimal refueling policies leads to an elegant reduction of the problem of finding optimal refueling policies into the classical shortest path proble...

We explore a fixed-route vehicle refueling problem as a special case of the inventorycapacitated lot-sizing problem, and present a linear-time greedy algorithm for finding optimal refueling policies.

In this paper, we study the scheduling problem arising from refueling multiple satellites in a circular constellation. It is assumed that there is no fuel delivered to the constellation from an external source. Instead, all satellites in the constellation are assumed to be capable of refueling each other (peer-to-peer refueling). The total time to complete the rendezvous maneuvers including the...

In this paper, we study pure peer-to-peer (henceforth abbreviated as P2P) and mixed (combined single-spacecraft and P2P) satellite refueling in circular orbit constellations comprised of multiple satellites. We consider the optimization of two conflicting objectives in the refueling problem and show that the cost function we choose to determine the optimal refueling schedule reflects a reasonab...

We study the airplane refueling problem which was introduced by the physicists Gamow and Stern in their classical book Puzzle-Math (1958). Sticking to the original story behind this problem, suppose we have to deliver a bomb in some distant point of the globe, the distance being much greater than the range of any individual airplane at our disposal. Therefore, the only feasible option to carry ...

This paper addresses a fuel-constrained, autonomous vehicle path planning problem in the presence of multiple refueling stations. We are given a set of targets, a set of refueling stations, and a depot where m vehicles are stationed. The vehicles are allowed to refuel at any refueling station, and the objective of the problem is to determine a route for each vehicle starting and terminating at ...

A variation of the P2P strategy, known as egalitarian P2P (E-P2P) refueling strategy, relaxes the restriction on the active satellites to return to their original orbital slots after undergoing the fuel transactions. The E-P2P refueling problem can be formulated as a three-index assignment problem on an undirected tripartite constellation graph, which can be solved using, say, a Greedy Random A...

a r t i c l e i n f o The fixed-route vehicle-refueling problem (FRVRP) is a mathematical problem widely used in the U.S. trucking industry. The FRVRP seeks the best refueling policy (sequence of fuel stations to use, along with the fueling quantity at each station) for a given (fixed) origin–destination route that minimizes a vehicle's refueling cost. While effective, the current FRVRP methods...

Satellite refueling can extend the lifetime of satellite constellations. Peer-to-peer satellite refueling in particular has the potential to make the most efficient use of the fuel contained in the constellation by redistributing it as on a need-to basis. In this paper we present an alternative implementation of P2P refueling, namely pairing up fuel sufficient satellites with fuel deficient sat...