Optimizing Energy Recovery in Hybrid Electric Vehicles Using A-ECMS Strategy

An improved A-ECMS energy management for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles considering transient characteristics of engine

Exploiting driving history for optimising the Energy Management in plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) are used to overcome the short-range and long charging time problems of purely electric vehicles. HEVs have at least two power sources. Therefore, the Energy Management (EM) strategy for dividing the driver requested power between the available power sources plays an important role in achieving good HEV performance. This work, proposes a novel real-time EM strategy for HEVs which is named ECMS-CESO. ECMS-CESO is based on the Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (ECMS) and is designed to Catch Energy Saving Opportunities (CESO) while operating the vehicle. ECMS-CESO is an instantaneous optimal controller, i. e., it does not require prediction of the future demanded power by the driver. Therefore, ECMS-CESO is tractable for real-time operation. Under certain conditions ECMS achieves the maximum fuel economy. The main challenge in employing ECMS is the estimation of the optimal equivalence factor L*. Unfortunately, L* is drive-cycle dependent, i. e., it changes from driver to driver and/or route to route. The lack of knowledge about L* has been a motivation for studying a new class of EM strategies known as Adaptive ECMS (A-ECMS). A-ECMS yields a causal controller that calculates L(t) at each moment t as an estimate of L*. Existing A-ECMS algorithms estimate L*, by heuristic approaches. Here, instead of direct estimation of L*, analytic bounds on L* are determined which are independent of the drive-cycle. Knowledge about the range of L*, can be used to adaptively set L(t) as performed by the ECMS-CESO algorithm. ECMS-CESO also defines soft constraints on the battery state of charge (SOC) and a penalty for exceeding the soft constraints. ECMS-CESO is allowed to exceed a SOC soft constraint when an energy saving opportunity is available. ECMS-CESO is efficient since there is no need for prediction and the intensive calculations for finding the optimal control over the predicted horizon are not required. Simulation results for 3 different HEVs are used to confirm the expected performance of ECMS-CESO. This work also investigates the performance of the model predictive control with respect to the predicated horizon length.

Adaptive real-time energy management control strategy based on fuzzy inference system for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Hierarchical control strategies for energy management of connected hybrid electric vehicles in urban roads

A Predictive Energy Management Strategy for Multi-mode Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle based on Long short-term Memory Neural Network

A hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) is a product that can greatly alleviate problems related to the energy crisis and environmental pollution. However, replacing such a battery will increase the cost of usage before the end of the life of a HEV. Thus, research on the multi-objective energy management control problem, which aims to not only minimize the gasoline consumption and consumed electricity but also prolong battery life, is necessary and challenging for HEV. This paper presents an adaptive equivalent consumption minimization strategy based on a recurrent neural network (RNN-A-ECMS) to solve the multi-objective optimal control problem for a plug-in HEV (PHEV). The two objectives of energy consumption and battery loss are balanced in the cost function by a weighting factor that changes in real time with the operating mode and current state of the vehicle. The near-global optimality of the energy management control is guaranteed by the equivalent factor (EF) in the designed A-ECMS. As the determined EF is dependent on the optimal co-state of the Pontryagin’s minimum principle (PMP), which results in the online ECMS being regarded as a realization of PMP-based global optimization during the whole driving cycle. The time-varying weight factor and the co-state of the PMP are map tables on the state of charge (SOC) of the battery and power demand, which are established offline by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and real historical traffic data. In addition to the mappings of the weight factor and the major component of the EF linked to the optimal co-state of the PMP, the real-time performance of the energy management control is also guaranteed by the tuning component of the EF of A-ECMS resulting from the Proportional plus Integral (PI) control on the deviation between the battery SOC and the optimal trajectory of the SOC obtained by the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The RNN is trained offline by the SOC trajectory optimized by dynamic programming (DP) utilizing the historical traffic data. Finally, the effectiveness and the adaptability of the proposed RNN-A-ECMS are demonstrated on the test platform of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles based on GT-SUITE (a professional integrated simulation platform for engine/vehicle systems developed by Gamma Technologies of US company) compared with the existing strategy.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Energy management plays a key role in achieving higher fuel economy for plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) technology; the state of charge (SOC) profile of the battery during the entire driving trip determines the electric energy usage, thus determining the fuel consumed. The energy management algorithm should be designed to meet all driving scenarios while achieving the best possible fuel economy. The knowledge of the power requirement during a driving trip is necessary to achieve the best fuel economy results; performance of the energy management algorithm is closely related to the amount of information available in the form of road grade, velocity profiles, trip distance, weather characteristics and other exogenous factors. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) allow vehicles to communicate with one another and the infrastructure to collect data about surrounding, and forecast the expected events, e.g., traffic condition, turns, road grade, and weather forecast. The ability to effectively interpret this traffic and weather data to estimate the power demand is important for the energy management and plays crucial role in the battery utilization.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">This paper presents an important step towards ITS integration with energy management of PHEVs: the goal of this research is to determine the correlation (or heuristic relationship) between different road events, weather conditions and PHEV energy management performance. The first step of this study utilizes real world data collected from a plug-in Toyota Prius (after-market conversion kit Hymotion L5) to determine the correlations between events and velocity profile characteristics. The second step finds the impact of power profile characteristics on the performance of equivalent consumption minimization Strategy (ECMS) for PHEV energy management using a high fidelity, validated PHEV simulator. The goal of this study is to identify the impact factors and define qualitative impact on the energy management algorithm and vehicle fuel economy.</div></div>

This paper deals with optimization algorithms for energy management of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs). In order to maximize fuel economy of a PHEV, the battery should attain its lowest admissible state of charge at the end of the driving cycle by following an optimal State of Charge (SOC) profile. Finding this optimal profile is a challenging optimization problem and requires prior knowledge of the entire driving cycle. There are many different optimization methods that can be applied to the energy management of PHEVs and they are usually classified into two main categories according to the optimality of their solutions. In general, in order to obtain the global optimum, the complete knowledge of future driving conditions is needed. This requirement renders unfeasible the on-line implementation of such strategies. On the other hand, simpler algorithms which are on-board implementable, do not provide the optimal solution. In this paper, a global optimal strategy — Dynamic Programming, is considered as a benchmark for evaluating the performance of an onboard implementable strategy — Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy with linearly decreasing reference SOC’. The study is conducted on an energy-based model of a parallel hybrid powertrain developed in Matlab/Simulink environment. The model and each powertrain components are validated based on road tests and laboratory data for a Chevrolet Equinox (hybridized at The Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research). The optimality assessment considers two main metrics, namely fuel economy and deviations from the optimal SOC profile. Simulations are carried out by considering different driving scenarios and battery sizes. Results show that for longer distances and bigger batteries, Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy and Dynamic Programming provide similar fuel economy and SOC profiles.

An equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS) is one of the most powerful and practical ways to improve the fuel efficiency of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). In an ECMS, it is important to determine the optimal equivalent factor to reach a global optimal solution. The optimal equivalent factor is determined by driving conditions. Previous studies have used an adaptive ECMS (A-ECMS) to determine the appropriate equivalent factor according to changing driving conditions. An A-ECMS adjusts the equivalent factor by controlling the battery’s state of charge (SOC) to follow a reference SOC trajectory. It is therefore critical to identify a reference SOC trajectory that reflects real-world driving conditions. These conditions, which are composed of the HEV’s nonlinear dynamics and complex constraints, can be formulated into a nonlinear optimal control problem (NOCP). Here, we propose applying nonlinear programming (NLP) to an A-ECMS. The NLP-based ECMS algorithm can be divided into two parts: the use of an NLP to solve an NOCP to obtain the reference SOC trajectory and the application of an NLP solution (the result of the first part) to an A-ECMS. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NLP-based ECMS closely resembles a global optimal solution for dynamic programming in a relatively brief calculation time.

Energy management strategies are of the vital importance in fully playing the potential of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. This paper proposes an improved adaptive equivalent minimization strategy for a parallel plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. In this method, performance of adaptive equivalent minimization strategy is prompted through incorporating information of future driving condition into equivalent factor adjustment. Two main works have been done. First, a novel equivalent factor adjustment method is proposed in the improved adaptive equivalent minimization strategy. Based on the predicted information of future driving condition, equivalent factor is tuned in each running loop of equivalent minimization strategy. Second, information of future driving condition is predicted by harnessing floating car data. Benefit from future driving condition forecasting, the improved adaptive equivalent minimization strategy holds better capability in accommodating road condition switching and preliminary self-regulation for hilly road. Simulation results show that, compared with the convention adaptive equivalent minimization strategy, the improved adaptive equivalent minimization strategy can obtain better fuel economy.

Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are equipped with multiple power sources for improving the efficiency and performance of their power supply system. An energy management (EM) strategy is needed to optimize the internal power flows and satisfy the driver's power demand. To achieve maximum fuel profits from EM, many solution methods have been presented. Optimal solution methods are typically not feasible in an online application due to their computational demand and their need to have a priori knowledge about future vehicle power demand. In this paper, an online EM strategy is presented with the ability to mimic the optimal solution but without using a priori road information. Rather than solving a mathematical optimization problem, the methodology concentrates on a physical explanation about when to produce, consume, and store electric power. This immediately reveals the vehicle characteristics that are important for EM. It is shown that this concept applies to many existing HEVs as well as possible future vehicle configurations. Since the method only focuses on typical vehicle characteristics, the underlying algorithm requires minor computational effort and can be executed in real time. Clear directions for online implementation are given in this paper. A parallel HEV with a 5-kW integrated starter/generator (ISG) is selected to demonstrate the performance of the EM strategy. Simulation results indicate that the proposed EM strategy exhibits similar behavior as an optimal solution obtained from dynamic programming. Profits in fuel economy primarily arise from engine stop/start and energy obtained during regenerative braking. This latter energy is preferably used for pure electric propulsion where the internal combustion engine is switched off.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Electrification of vehicles is an important step towards making mobility more sustainable and carbon-free. Hybrid electric vehicles use an electric machine with an on-board energy storage system, in some form to provide additional torque and reduce the power requirement from the internal combustion engine. It is important to control and optimize this power source split between the engine and electric machine to make the best use of the system. This paper showcases an implementation of the Adaptive Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (A-ECMS) with minimization in real-time in the dSPACE MicroAutobox II as the Hybrid Supervisory Controller (HSC). While the concept of A-ECMS has been well established for many years, there are no published papers that present results obtained in a production vehicle suitably modified from conventional to hybrid electric propulsion including real world testing as well as testing on regulatory cycles. This paper details all the supportive algorithms that made this possible and the specific components to achieve the A-ECMS implementation and outlines design and performance details.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">A-ECMS was tested for 1400+ miles of vehicle testing with 130,000+ miles on virtual environments (Model-in-Loop and Hardware-in-Loop) to determine the best calibration parameters for the battery-fuel equivalency factor and the penalties to achieve the best fuel economy. This strategy was implemented on a 2019 Chevrolet Blazer modified into a hybrid by The Ohio State University's EcoCAR team. Several comparisons are presented between the vehicle with A-ECMS and a stock vehicle. The project vehicle showed 6% fuel improvement in city cycles over the stock vehicle and 17% over the standardized FTP Drive Cycle on a two-axle dynamometer.</div></div>

The adaptability of the supervisory control strategy of plug-in hybrid electric buses (PHEBs) to different driving styles determines the energy-saving performance. This paper proposes a driver-oriented adaptive equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS) for PHEBs. The strategy aims to improve the fuel economy of PHEBs as much as possible by adapting to different driving styles while satisfying the physical constraints of the hybrid power system. Firstly, an online driving style recognition algorithm based on the Fuzzy K-means (FKM) algorithm and the random forest (RF) method is devised, in which the FKM algorithm is used to preprocess the feature parameters related to driving styles and the RF method is utilized to identify the driver’s driving style. Secondly, the driving style recognition results are introduced into the ECMS framework to form a driver-oriented energy management strategy. Finally, the proposed control strategy is verified using both Matlab/Simulink and Hardware-in-the-Loop. The verification results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy improves the fuel economy of PHEBs.

The desire to reduce carbon emissions due to transportation sources has led over the past decade to the development of new propulsion technologies, focused on vehicle electrification (including hybrid, plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles). These propulsion technologies, along with advances in telecommunication and computing power, have the potential of making passenger and commercial vehicles more energy efficient and environment friendly. In particular, energy management algorithms are an integral part of plug-in vehicles and are very important for achieving the performance benefits. The optimal performance of energy management algorithms depends strongly on the ability to forecast energy demand from the vehicle. Information available about environment (temperature, humidity, wind, road grade, etc.) and traffic (traffic density, traffic lights, etc.), is very important in operating a vehicle at optimal efficiency. This article outlines some current technologies that can help achieving this optimum efficiency goal. In addition to information available from telematic and geographical information systems, knowledge of projected vehicle charging demand on the power grid is necessary to build an intelligent energy management controller for future plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles. The impact of charging millions of vehicles from the power grid could be significant, in the form of increased loading of power plants, transmission and distribution lines, emissions and economics (information are given and discussed for the US case). Therefore, this effect should be considered in an intelligent way by controlling/scheduling the charging through a communication based distributed control.