Energy Efficient Control of the Air Compressor in a Serial Hybrid Bus based on Smart Data

The development of new concepts for a public transport is motivated by reducing environmental pollution and traffic jams in city areas. Another essential reason for energy efficient vehicle concepts is to reduce transportation costs. Accordingly, a design and production of environmental friendly and emission free vehicles for urban public transportation is an important research and technological task. The architecture of a serial hybrid bus has the big capability to achieve above-mentioned aims because such vehicles have two energy sources (more degree of freedom) and more than one energy storage unit (battery, air tanks of vehicle pneumatic system). Thus, there is a big potential for the development of predictive control algorithms for various systems to enhance the overall energy efficiency and driving performance of such type of public transport.Today the control algorithms of different systems in hybrid electric vehicles are implemented often as the kind of open-loop control. A typical example is the control strategy of vehicle air compressor. Currently, this unit of vehicle pneumatic system is operated by the principle of two-point controller regardless of the vehicle driving status and location on a route, the traffic situation and battery state, the number of passengers etc. Taking into account modern networking technologies it is possible to achieve a higher level of vehicle systems control with the aim to enhance the overall energy efficiency of vehicle operation. The goal is to develop vehicles on various types of closed-loop control systems (e.g. battery state of charge depending on system- and route parameters) towards smart vehicles (interconnection with the environment, additional history data, prediction etc.).Authors focus on the development of closed-loop control strategy for the air compressor in a serial hybrid bus, as a first step, to improve the energy efficiency of compressor operation. Furthermore, the paper discusses how to increase the overall efficiency of vehicles including already implemented networking technologies.