An Energy Management Strategy for Fuel-cell Hybrid Electric Vehicles via Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

The paper focuses on an energy management strategy for an electric vehicles powered with three power sources (PEM fuel cells, LiFePO4 battery and supercapacitors). The aim of the proposed strategy is to split the power demand between the different sources maximizing the driving range and the performances of the vehicle and increasing the life cycle of the battery and of the PEM fuel cell. To accomplish load sharing an energetic model of the overall system based on experimentally validated models of the PEM Fuel Cell, LiFePO4 battery and supercapacitors is formulated and an optimal control problem with inequality constraints is resolved using the particle swarm optimization technique (PSO) to search the global near-optimum at each sample interval. The results show that the proposed strategy guarantees energy saving and assures failsafe operations for the battery and the PEM Fuel Cell unaffecting the drivability of the vehicle and increasing autonomy.