Energy management strategy with mutation protection for fuel cell electric vehicles

Abstract

For hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, energy management strategies (EMS) are vital for balancing fuel cell and battery power, limiting fuel cell power, maintaining state of charge (SOC) fluctuation range and mitigating degradation. Reinforcement learning-based EMS, especially using deep Q-network (DQN) and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), have demonstrated potential for enhancing the fuel economy of hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV). This research proposes mutation protection DQN (MPD)-based EMS to improve hydrogen fuel economy and reduce fuel cell degradation under driving cycles with plenty of mutations. By quantifying mutation, exploring its relationship with driving conditions and integrating a mutation protection module with DQN, MPD-based EMS achieves approximately 11% and 6% better fuel economy compared to the other two learning-based EMS. Additionally, it also reduces fuel cell degradation by approximately 21% and 13%.