A Safety-Driven Cost Optimization for the Real-Time Operation of a Hybrid Energy System

Thinking-green consciousness is pushing international authorities to impose new regulations about the use of energy and CO2 emissions. Many hybrid energy solutions using renewable energies have been proposed and deployed. Designing real-time controllers that perform efficient and safe energy management is a challenging task due strong safety requirements, dynamic operation cost and real-time power demands. In this paper, we consider a hybrid combination of Fuel Cells (FC) and batteries sub-systems to aliment a marine vessel. Our contribution is to design a safety-driven efficient energy management control to dynamically schedule the energy sources to supply the real-time power requests so that 1) we maintain the system safety by not overloading or heating up an energy source; 2) reduce the operation cost by considering the cheapest energy source in a real-time manner. We use the symbolic model checker Uppaal to verify the safety properties. To demonstrate the efficiency of our energy scheduling, we analyze an actual case study.