An Energy Management Strategy for Power-split Hybrid Electric Vehicle using Model Predictive Control

Abstract

To fulfil future demand for energy and to control pollution, a power-split hybrid electric vehicle is a promising solution combining attributes of a conventional vehicle and an electric vehicle. Since energy is available from two subsystems i.e, engine and battery, there is the freedom to manage it optimally. In this work, model predictive control strategy, that has the constraint handling which makes it a better choice over other strategies for efficient energy management of hybrid electric vehicles. A detailed mathematical model of the power split configured hybrid electric vehicle is developed that encompasses the engine, planetary gear, motor/generator, inverter, and battery. An interior-point optimizer based-nonlinear model predictive control strategy is applied to the developed model by incorporation of operational constraints and cost function. The objective is to curtail fuel consumption while the battery’s state of charge should be maintained within predefined limits. The complete developed model was simulated in MATLAB for motor, generator, engine speed, and battery SoC. Computed specific fuel consumption from the proposed MPC during the NEDC and the HWFET cycles are 4.356liters/100km and 2.474 litres/100 km, respectively. These findings are validated by the rule-based strategy of ADVISOR 2003 that provides 4.900 litres/100 km and 3.600 litres/100 km over the NEDC and the HWFET cycles, respectively. This indicates that the proposed MPC shows 11.11 % and 31.26 % improvement in specific fuel consumption in the NEDC and HWFET drive cycles respectively.