Development of a power management strategy to minimize the fuel consumption of a heavy-duty series hybrid electric vehicle

This paper presents a power management strategy to minimize the fuel consumption of a heavy-duty series hybrid electric vehicle. The vehicle model, which consists of a CNG engine, a generator, two driving motors and a battery, is developed and validated with experimental data. Dynamic programming (DP) is applied to design a control algorithm optimizing fuel consumption of the series hybrid electric vehicle. By imitating the behavior of the DP control signal, a rule-based control algorithm is proposed. The controller actuates the CNG engine, generator, and battery to minimize fuel consumption and maintain the battery state of charge within a proper region. Simulation studies and experiments are conducted for typical driving modes to investigate the performance of the proposed power management strategy. Results indicate that fuel economy can be enhanced by approximately 30% using the proposed power management strategy to the series hybrid electric vehicle over the conventional vehicle.