Robust Energy Management Control Strategy in Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Hybrid electric vehicles require an optimal energy management strategy in order to actually optimize their consumption. Many real-time controls were recently proposed in literature, but as each study is performed in a specific context, it is difficult to compare their efficiencies. The present paper proposes a multilevel control. The highest level (third) can optimize the operating mode, predict battery state of charge, vehicle power consumption, Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and Electrical Motor (EM) current optimal efficiencies. In the second level, an optimal controller is developed to generate the optimal EM and ICE torques set points. Then, in the first level, there are robust tracking controllers to regulate the set points of each vehicle subsystems. A MATLAB simulation results show that the proposed strategy increases vehicle energy efficiency w.r.t. other strategy.