On a Stochastic Approach of the ECMS Method for Energy Management in Hybrid Electric Vehicles*

This paper examines the problem of optimal energy management in vehicles with hybrid powertrains. There is a large literature addressing this problem, with successful application of different optimal control techniques, however, many of them optimise the control strategy for certain driving cycles. This paper takes into account that the driving cycle is not known a priori. The proposed method is based on saving the current driving conditions in a database with different clusters in order to use this information to estimate future driving conditions. Once the future driving conditions are estimated, the ECMS technique is used to minimise the fuel consumption, taking into account that the expected value of the battery energy consumption should be zero at the infinity. Simulations show that the proposed method allows charge sustainability providing near-optimal results.