Research on energy management strategy of fuel-cell vehicles based on nonlinear model predictive control

Abstract

Fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles (FCHEV) are one of the most promising new energy vehicles. The cost and lifetime of its powertrain have limited its commercial development. This paper proposed an energy management strategy based on nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) technology to solve the economy and durability problem of FCHEVs. Based on Markov Monte Carlo(MCMC) method, a prediction model of multi-scale operating conditions is established, and dynamic programming(DP) is used to realize the optimal control in the predicted time domain. The “constant speed prediction” is innovatively adopted in the transition stage to improve the prediction accuracy and enable the model to be realized online. The ways to reduce calculating amount of NMPC are also discussed in this paper. This simplification leads to suboptimal fuel economy and durability of control system but can have obvious reduction in calculating time. The simulation results show that, compared with the thermostat strategy and the power following strategy, the degradation cost decrease of 11.1% and 23.9% and the total operation cost of NMPC decrease of 11.0% and 23.5% respectively. The NMPC strategy has better economy and durability than the rule-based energy management strategy, is close to the global optimal result obtained by dynamic programming and can meet the requirements of real-time control.