A Combinatorial Optimization Approach for the Electrical Energy Management in a Multi-Source System

International audienceMinimizing the consumption of hydrogen by a fuel cell system in a hybrid vehicle can reduce its environmental impact and increase its autonomy. However an intelligent management of power distribution is essential to meet the demand of the powertrain. The characteristics of the sources constituting the energy chain of the hybrid vehicle (efficiency and energy losses) make the mathematical model nonlinear. Solution methods such as Dynamic Programming and Quasi-Newton which have so far been developed in previous works give satisfactory results but with very large computation times. In this paper, a new combinatorial model is proposed and a Branch-and-Cut method is developed to solve the problem to optimality. This approach leads to drastically reduced computation times