Power Scheduling in More Electric Aircraft Based on an Optimal Adaptive Control Strategy

Abstract

In this article, an optimal control problem (OCP) for the power management system is proposed for the more electric aircraft (MEA) with consideration of the dynamics in the generators and the energy storage systems. Electrical power components included in the electrical power system (EPS) of MEA such as the generator, the bus, the rectifier, and the battery system are modeled in this OCP. Based on this formulation, a three-stage optimization architecture is introduced to obtain the optimal power references and the optimal control policies. In the first stage, an optimization problem for the power scheduling and allocation is solved as a mixed integer quadratic programming problem and the optimal power allocation schemes (power references) are obtained. In the second stage, an OCP to minimize the fluctuations in power generation systems is proposed and solved via an off-policy integral reinforcement learning approach. In the third stage, the voltage restoration is applied to maintain the main-bus voltage in the onboard high voltage dc system. Extensive case studies are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology. Simulations show that the optimal power references are obtained based on various requirements, and the optimal power control policy is achieved based on off-policy iterations.