Computationally efficient energy management of a planetary gear hybrid electric vehicle

Paper in proceeding, 2014

We present a method for obtaining a computationally efficient, sub-optimal energy management of an electrified vehicle containing a planetary gear set. We first reformulate the optimization problem to become separable in space (optimization variables). The problem is then decomposed into two optimization problems. The first is a static problem that looks for the optimal engine speed that maximizes efficiency of a compound unit, resembling an engine-generator unit combining the planetary gear and kinetic energy converters connected to it. The second is a dynamic optimization problem deciding the optimal power split between an electric buffer and the compound unit. By approximating the losses of the compound unit as convex, second order polynomial in generated power, we are able to solve the power split problem in less than 2 seconds, when the engine on/off sequence is known in advance. By comparing results with dynamic programming, we observed an approximation error of less than 0.2%.