Unlock the flexibility for cooperative operation of hydrogen providers under transportation delay

Hydrogen provides a pathway to the clean transition of the future energy mix, rendering hydrogen energy service providers (HESPs) an important role in hydrogen supply. Additionally, collaborative operation through vehicle-based hydrogen transportation exhibits great potential for mitigating source–load fluctuations of HESPs. However, current collaborations on hydrogen transportation primarily focus on route selection while neglecting delay risks, which may precipitate abrupt energy deficits during the scheduling of energy receivers. This work proposes a multi-HESP cooperative game that considers a deadline assignment mechanism to ensure the robustness of hydrogen delivery while fully unlocking the scheduling flexibility supported by the road network. Considering the transportation-time uncertainty, the distributionally robust joint chance constraint (DRJCC) is introduced to model delay uncertainties effectively and improve hydrogen delivery reliability. A customized approximation method is proposed to reformulate the DRJCC model into a tractable approximation with low conservatism while enhancing flexibility in decision-making under transportation delay uncertainty. Case studies verify that the proposed framework can improve the flexibility and enthusiasm of multi-HESP cooperation under the electricity–hydrogen transmission network.