Real-Time Vehicle System Controller Design for a Hybrid Fuel Cell Bus

The Hybrid Fuel Cell Bus investigated adopts a hierarchy control system structure, of which the four main components have independent sub-controllers, and besides, a super-level Vehicle System Controller (VSC) was added to coordinate the system operation. The vehicle has dual power sources, fuel cell engine and battery, which implies that for a certain power demand of the driver, power distribution between them should be determined. This brings the possibility of system optimization while requires well coordination of the distributed sub-controllers in a system-level coherent way, which to some extent increases the complexity of controller design. Based on the experimental modeling of the fuel cell bus, this paper presents a systematic design method of the VSC supervisory control strategy to address these issues. For the validation of the developed VSC, a hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation platform was setup. From the virtual tests, controller functions validation and parameters precalibration were achieved. Finally, the VSC was tested on the test bench and successfully applied to the target Hybrid Fuel Cell Bus. Experimental testing results show the satisfactory performances of the developed VSC.