Refueling problem of alternative fuel vehicles under intuitionistic fuzzy refueling waiting times: a fuzzy approach

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. In this paper, a new problem as refueling an alternative fuel vehicle on a given path is formulated to minimize the cost of refueling and waiting times in the stations for refueling operations, simultaneously. To be more close to real-world situations, the waiting times are considered as intuitionistic fuzzy numbers in order to reflect uncertainty as well as hesitation due to various uncontrollable factors. To cope with the uncertainty of the problem, an intuitionistic fuzzy chance constrained method based on credibility measure is proposed to convert the fuzzy formulation to a crisp model. In order to tackle the bi-objective crisp formulation, a new interactive fuzzy solution method is proposed. A computational study on a real case from Turkey shows that the performance of the presented method is either better or the same as the approaches of the literature.}