Optimal control of a parallel hybrid vehicle with a traffic preview

In this work, a short preview of traffic provided by on-board sensors is used to minimize fuel consumption in a parallel hybrid vehicle capable of controlling both the vehicle velocity and the torque-split ratio. A two-stage version of Pontryagin’s minimum principle was used, but some of the standard simplifying assumptions in reduced-order modelling of hybrid vehicles were avoided to ensure that the fuel economy is not unduly compromised. The proposed controller is implemented in a receding-horizon fashion to incorporate updated telemetry information at each sampling instant. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulations on two hybrid vehicle models containing higherorder dynamics and non-linearities. It is shown that the controller maintains the engine operation within the highengine-efficiency region, and successive improvements in the fuel economy are achieved as the traffic preview length is increased.