Rule-based equivalent fuel consumption minimization strategies for hybrid vehicles

The highest control layer of a (hybrid) vehicular drive train is termed the Energy Management Strategy (EMS). In this paper an overview of different control methods is given and a new rule-based EMS is introduced based on the combination of Rule-Based and Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategies (RB-ECMS). The RB-ECMS uses one main design parameter and requires no tuning of many threshold control values and parameters. This design parameter represents the maximum propulsion power of the secondary power source (i.e., electric machine/battery) during pure electric driving. The RB-ECMS is compared with the strategy based on Dynamic Programming (DP), which is inherently optimal for a given cycle. The RB-ECMS proposed in this paper requires significantly less computation time with the similar result as DP (within 1% accuracy).