A Pseudospectral Strategy for Optimal Power Management in Series Hybrid Electric Powertrains

This paper examines the problem of optimizing hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) power management for fuel economy. This paper begins by presenting a pseudospectral algorithm to solve this optimization problem. Compared with traditional dynamic programming (DP)-based optimal power management approaches, this algorithm has two key advantages: It is numerically more efficient, and it furnishes both the optimal state and costate trajectories. Building on the second advantage, this paper proposes a two-level strategy for optimal power management in vehicles commuting along fixed routes. The upper level of the proposed strategy is a costate adaptation algorithm employing pseudospectral optimization, whereas the lower level is an instantaneous optimization controller employing Pontryagin's minimum principle (PMP). This paper shows its pseudospectral optimization algorithm and two-level strategy using numerical simulation for a series hybrid school bus. Parameters of the bus powertrain model are obtained from experimental component tests performed at the National Engineering Laboratory for Electric Vehicles, Beijing Institute of Technology. Simulation results show that the pseudospectral method reaches a solution close to DP with higher computational efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed two-level strategy is capable of adapting vehicle power management based on road-grade predictions, i.e., an attractive feature compared with more traditional online hybrid power management approaches such as the use of proportional integral derivative (PID) control for adaptive equivalent fuel consumption minimization [PID equivalent consumption minimization strategy (PID-ECMS)].