Powering mode-integrated energy management strategy for a plug-in hybrid electric truck with an automatic mechanical transmission based on Pontryagin's Minimum Principle

Abstract

Pontryagin's Minimum Principle (PMP) has a significant computational advantage over dynamic programming for energy management issues of hybrid electric vehicles. However, minimizing the total energy consumption for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle based on PMP is not always a two-point boundary value problem (TPBVP), as the optimal solution of a powering mode will be either a pure-electric driving mode or a hybrid discharging mode, depending on the trip distance. In this paper, based on a plug-in hybrid electric truck (PHET) equipped with an automatic mechanical transmission (AMT), we propose an integrated control strategy to flexibly identify the optimal powering mode in accordance with different trip lengths, where an electric-only-mode decision module is incorporated into the TPBVP by judging the auxiliary power unit state and the final battery state-of-charge (SOC) level. For the hybrid mode, the PMP-based energy management problem is converted to a normal TPBVP and solved by using a shooting method. Moreover, the energy management for the plug-in hybrid electric truck with an AMT involves simultaneously optimizing the power distribution between the auxiliary power unit (APU) and the battery, as well as the gear-shifting choice. The simulation results with long- and short-distance scenarios indicate the flexibility of the PMP-based strategy. Furthermore, the proposed control strategy is compared with dynamic programming (DP) and a rule-based charge-depleting and charge-sustaining (CD-CS) strategy to evaluate its performance in terms of computational accuracy and time efficiency.