Optimal Design of a Sustainable Hydrogen Supply Chain Network: Application in an Airport Ecosystem

Hydrogen and fuel cell technologies are one solution for addressing the challenges that major airports are facing today, such as upward price trends of liquid hydrocarbon fuels, greenhouse gas emission regulations, and stricter noise and air pollutant emission regulations, especially for on-ground pollution. An airport can also be viewed as the center of a hydrogen ecosystem, around which multiple hydrogen users could be clustered, with cost sharing of hydrogen production and storage occurring among users. The main novelty of the present work is the design of a hydrogen infrastructure irrigated by the airport ecosystem that satisfies the airport ecosystem energy needs. For this purpose, the model development is based on a multiobjective optimization framework designed to consider four echelons: energy sources, hydrogen production, transportation, and storage. The multiperiod problem is then solved using the ε-constraint method. Two objective functions are involved, that is, the total daily cost (TDC) of the network and an environmental indicator based on the global warming potential. The second innovative contribution is to model the demand uncertainty using fuzzy concepts for a hydrogen supply chain design. Because hydrogen demand is one the most significant parameters, the uncertainty of the demand has been considered using a proposed fuzzy linear programming strategy. The solutions are compared with the original crisp model, giving more robustness to the proposed approach. This work has been performed in the framework of the Hyport meta-project and, in particular, within the “H₂ modeling” project. This paper focuses on a hydrogen airport ecosystem located in the department of Hautes-Pyrénées (France). However, the developed methodology could be extended to other hydrogen ecosystems for which deployment involves a multiperiod multi-objective formulation under an uncertain demand.