Real-Time Integrated Power and Thermal Management of Connected HEVs Based on Hierarchical Model Predictive Control

Cabin heating requirement and engine efficiency degradation in cold weather lead to considerable increase in fuel consumption of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). This article focuses on the development of a real-time control framework for integrated power and thermal management (i-PTM) of a connected HEV through incorporating vehicle speed preview informed by traffic connectivity. To evaluate the ceiling of the fuel economy improvement via i-PTM, forward dynamic programming (FDP) is adopted as a benchmark study to find the global optimization solution and then implemented into a centralized model predictive controller (CMPC). Regarding the slow response associated with the coupled electric-thermal dynamics in the HEV, a two-layer hierarchical MPC (HMPC) framework is developed, which exploits vehicle speed preview predictions over short and long prediction horizons to optimize fuel consumption while satisfying power and cabin heating demand. The simulation results show that the proposed HMPC provides near-optimal solutions in reference to the benchmark while reduces up to 79% computation burden compared with CMPC. Additionally, compared to a baseline power management (PM) controller, up to 5.46% improvement on fuel economy can be achieved by HMPC for congested driving scenarios. Finally, the real-time feasibility of the HMPC is assessed in a dSPACE rapid prototyping system.