Application of alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm in energy management of fuel cell vehicles

In this paper, a method based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is proposed to solve the energy management problem for fuel cell vehicles (FCVs). Taking the minimum hydrogen consumption as the objective function, a new fuel cell dynamical system and a whole vehicle model that conform to the property of convex function are constructed, and an augmented Lagrangian equation with its scaled dual form is established, which satisfies the standard normal form of ADMM algorithm. For the first time, the ADMM algorithm is applied to energy management system of FCVs. In the meantime, a cyclic constraint inspection strategy is introduced to have a further precise control of the power of the fuel cell system so that it can meet the dynamic change constraints of the power. Compared with dynamic programming (DP) algorithm off-line calculation results, the simulation results of the proposed method indicate that the calculation of this algorithm is approximately 20–200 times faster than the former in 9 standard driving cycles. And under the two energy management modes by power maintenance and consumption, the deviation results in terms of the hydrogen consumption derived from the proposed method and DP were 2.37% and 1.06% respectively.