Energy management for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles using Equivalent Consumption Minimisation Strategy

One strategy to minimise petroleum fuel consumption of a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) is to attain the lowest admissible battery State of Charge (SOC) at the end of driving cycle while following an optimal SOC profile. The challenge of an optimisation algorithm is to find this optimal profile by using least future information about the power demand. An application of Equivalent Consumption Minimisation Strategy (ECMS) for PHEV is presented in this paper and benchmarked against the dynamic programming (DP) for information requirement and optimality. The optimality is assessed in simulation by considering petroleum fuel economy and deviation of the optimal SOC profile from a reference profile for different driving scenarios and battery sizes. Results show that for longer distances and larger battery sizes, ECMS and DP provide similar fuel economy and SOC profiles. A sensitivity analysis with respect to driving distance is presented at the end of the paper.