MPC-Based Energy Management Strategy for an Autonomous Hybrid Electric Vehicle
Saeed Amirfarhangi Bonab, Ali Emadi
Abstract
Despite the current intense research on each of the subjects of electrification and autonomous driving, potential advantages as a result of the interaction of these two mainstreams in automotive have not been effectively studied yet. Autonomous vehicles generate an unprecedented amount of real-time data due to excessive use of perception sensors and processing units. In this article, we present a novel approach for improving the fuel economy of an autonomous hybrid electric vehicle by taking advantage of this qrydata. We introduce the term of autonomous-specific energy management strategy (ASEMS) and we present an example of such a strategy using model predictive control (MPC). Specifically, we show how a more fuel-optimal energy management strategy (EMS) can be achieved for the power-split powertrain of an autonomous hybrid electric vehicle using the motion planning data. We use an optimization-based motion planning approach and feed the resulting velocity profile up to the prediction horizon to the MPC-based EMS. The presented approach shows 2% to 12.81% less fuel consumption for the two extreme cases of 100 and 1000 meters as the prediction horizons, compared to a rule-based EMS. The presented EMS fuel-optimality for the 1000 meters is only 6.91% sub-optimal compared to the globally optimal results of dynamic programming.