This paper proposes a comparison study of energy management methods for a parallel plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). Based on detailed analysis of the vehicle driveline, quadratic convex functions are presented to describe the nonlinear relationship between engine fuel-rate and battery charging power at different vehicle speed and driveline power demand. The engine-on power threshold is estimated by the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, and the battery power command is achieved by convex optimization with target of improving fuel economy, compared with the dynamic programming (DP) based method and the charging depleting–charging sustaining (CD/CS) method. In addition, the proposed control methods are discussed at different initial b...