Heuristics and lower bounds for minimizing fuel consumption in hybrid-electrical vehicles

In hybrid electric vehicles, the electrical powertrain system has multiple energy sources that it can gather power from to satisfy the propulsion power requested by the vehicle at each instant. This paper focusses on the minimization of the fuel consumption of such a vehicle, taking advantage of the different energy sources. Based on global optimization approaches, the proposed heuristics find solutions that best split the power requested between the multi-electrical sources available. A lower bounding procedure is introduced to validate the quality of the solutions. Computational results show a significant improvement over previous results from the literature in both the computing time and the quality of the solutions.