Model Predictive Control as an Energy Management Strategy for Hybrid Electric Vehicles

The energy management strategy in a hybrid electric vehicle is viewed as an optimal control problem and is solved using Model Predictve Control (MPC). The method is applied to a series hybrid electric vehicle, using a linearized model in state space formulation and a linear MPC algorithm, based on quadratic programming, to find a feasible suboptimal solution. The significance of the results lies in obtaining a real-time implementable control law. The MPC algorithm is applied using a quasi-static simulator developed in the MATLAB environment. The MPC solution is compared with the dynamic programming solution (offline optimization). The dynamic programming algorithm, which requires the entire driving cycle to be known a-priori, guarantees the optimality and is used here as the benchmark solution. The effect of the parameters of the MPC (length of prediction horizon, type of prediction) is also investigated.