Stochastic Dynamic Programming of Air Conditioning System under Time-varying Passenger Condition for Electric Bus

The variation of the number of passengers carried in an electric bus is an obsessional disturbance for the temperature control and energy management of the air-conditioning (AC) system. This paper aims at optimally controlling the AC system output power and improving its potential energy efficiency by analysing the number variation of passengers. A probability distribution matrix of the number of passengers along the bus stops is formulated. Dynamic programming (DP) is employed to produce the optimal AC control behavior when stochastic number of passengers is estimated. Simulation results show that DP with randomly estimate number of passengers is able to meet the temperature performance requirements and the average energy consumption is improved by over 8% compared with DP when a fixed passenger number is assumed.