Optimal control based algorithms for energy management of automotive power systems with battery/supercapacitor storage devices

• Systematic approach is proposed to control optimally the automotive power systems.
• Energy management algorithms are based on Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle.
• Both single and hybrid energy storage systems are investigated.
• State constraints on the supercapacitor are considered in the control design.
• Real-time control strategies are directly derived from offline optimal algorithms.

The objective of this work is to show how to control the electric power systems of a vehicle in such a manner that their power flows should be optimized in the sense of energy efficiency. As will be seen, the control problem considered in this work can be formulated as an optimization problem in the presence of several constraints. A systematic approach based on optimal control will be adopted to design the energy management strategies. Then, by means of these strategies, the electric energy will be generated and stored in the most appropriate manner so that the overall energy consumption and eventually the pollutant emissions can be minimized for a given driving cycle. To this end, both non-causal optimization method using the knowledge of the entire driving cycle and causal one are developed for two case studies with different structures of energy storage system. These strategies are then evaluated in an advanced simulation environment to point out their effectiveness.