Design and Simulation of an Optimal Energy Management Strategy for Plug-In Electric Vehicles

Energy management algorithms play a critical role in improving the energy efficiency of modern electric vehicles. In order to be desirable for the customer, electric vehicles should be capable of long distance driving on a single battery charge with a range which must be comparable to the values of their conventional counterparts. To achieve this goal, both the use of large-capacity battery and the development of a custom energy management algorithm are necessary. Thus, one must solve equations of vehicle dynamics, which is a part of conventional methods used in generalized energy management problems. In this paper, a Monte Carlo method is proposed for probabilistic prediction of the optimum energy to attain a given route. The route in question is obtained from the Google Maps and includes locations and road topologies. First, optimum speed set-points are generated for each state of the journey, and this generated speed array is imported into the vehicle control system to generate the required torque for vehicle propulsion. Then, this process is repeated with a constant average speed for comparison purposes. The simulation results show that an electric vehicle gains significant energy efficiency over a Hardware in the Loop (HIL) emulation, when it is being controlled with the proposed speed set-points generated by the Monte Carlo method.