Cyber-Physical Predictive Energy Management for Through-the-Road Hybrid Vehicles

In this study, a Cyber-Physical System approach is proposed for the optimization of Through-The-Road (TTR) hybrid vehicles, in view of energy saving with a prior knowledge of road elevation. First, a hybrid powertrain for TTR vehicle is proposed for energy saving purposes and then the modeling of TTR hybrid vehicle is presented. Second, the proposed average power based model predictive controller (AP-MPC) is utilized to address the energy management problem for this TTR hybrid vehicle with only road elevation known as a priori obtained from the cyber word in Cyber-Physical System. A comparison study is proceeded to demonstrate the benefit of the hybrid powertrain compared to the traditional heavy commercial vehicle and the AP-MPC strategy compared with the prescient MPC and the rule-based energy management. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AP-MPC without any priori velocity information can achieve an impressive improvement of 15.6% in three typical case studies even only with the road elevation information enabled by the cyber world in Cyber-Physical System.