A control allocation approach to manage multiple energy sources in EVs

This article is concerned with the design of an energy management system (EMS) for the hybridization of multiple energy sources (ES's) in electric vehicles, focusing in a particular configuration composed by batteries and supercapacitors (SCs). As a first design step, we investigated an (non-causal) optimal power allocation, targeting the minimization of the energy losses over a complete driving cycle. Albeit the solution obtained with this formulation demands the advance knowledge of the vehicle driving cycle, it also provides a useful benchmark solution to assess the performance of causal EMS's. A more practical EMS is then derived, based on the control allocation (CA) concept. This approach, typically employed in redundant control systems, enable us to address the various objectives and constraints that appear in EMS design problem, such as the DC bus voltage regulation, SC state of charge tracking, minimization of power losses, current and state of charge limits, etc. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed CA based EMS, yielding performances very close to the optimal non-causal power allocation.