A novel ECMS and combined cost map approach for high-efficiency series hybrid electric vehicles

The main aim in the control of a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) is to decrease the fuel consumption and emissions without significant loss of driving performance. The performance of the vehicle in terms of fuel economy and emissions is very much dependent on the vehicle's supervisory control strategy. In this paper, the equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS) is developed with a novel approach for the charge sustaining of the batteries to provide an overall improved optimization performance for series hybrid electric vehicles (SHEVs), considering the efficiencies of the internal combustion engine (ICE), generator, and battery. Another novelty is the development of a combined map, which simultaneously facilitates the optimization of the fuel consumption and multiple emission components, unlike most past studies that have concentrated on one component at a time. After the derivation of the cost map, the algorithm is divided into two main parts. The first part optimizes the engine-generator set (GENSET), and the second part determines how much power is needed from the GENSET according to the ECMS. The algorithm is implemented using generic emission and fuel consumption maps of an actual mid-sized series hybrid bus to reduce the desired emissions. The hybrid electric vehicle in consideration is converted from a conventional bus that is driven by an ICE. The performance of the novel ECMS strategy is compared with the conventional vehicle, as well as the SHEV version that is driven by an on-off strategy. In addition to reduced fuel consumption, the results of this paper demonstrate a significant reduction of 14.58% in CO2 production with ECMS, whereas the on-off control strategy achieves only 6.47% reduction over the conventional vehicle.