Trip-based optimal power management of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) have demonstrated the capability to improve fuel economy and emissions. The plug-in HEV (PHEV), utilizing more battery power, has become a more attractive upgrade of the HEV. The charge-depletion mode is more appropriate for the power management of PHEVs, i.e., the state of charge (SOC) is expected to drop to a low threshold when the vehicle reaches the trip destination. Trip information has so far been considered as future information for vehicle operation and is thus not available a priori. This situation can be changed by the recent advancement in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) based on the use of on-board global positioning systems (GPSs), geographical information systems (GISs), and advanced traffic flow modeling techniques. In this paper, a new approach to optimal power management of PHEVs in the charge-depletion mode is proposed with driving cycle modeling based on the historic traffic information. A dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is applied to reinforce the charge-depletion control such that the SOC drops to a specific terminal value at the end of the driving cycle. The vehicle model was based on a hybrid electric sport utility vehicle (SUV). Only fuel consumption is considered for the current stage of the study. A simulation study was conducted for several standard driving cycles and two trip models using the proposed method, and the results showed significant improvement in fuel economy compared with a rule-based control and a depletion sustenance control for most cases. Furthermore, the results showed much better consistency in fuel economy compared with rule-based and depletion sustenance control.