Real-Time Predictive Optimization for Energy Management in a Hybrid Electric Vehicle

With increasing numbers of electric and hybrid vehicles on the road, transportation presents a unique opportunity to leverage data-driven intelligence to realize large scale impact in energy use and emissions. Energy management in these vehicles is highly sensitive to upcoming power load on the vehicle, which is not considered in conventional reactive policies calculated at design time. Advancements in cheap sensing and computation have enabled on-board upcoming load predictions which can be used to optimize energy management. In this work, we propose and evaluate a novel, real-time optimization strategy that leverages predictions from prior data in a simulated hybrid battery-supercapacitor energy management task. We demonstrate a complete adaptive system that improves over the lifetime of the vehicle as more data is collected and prediction accuracy improves. Using thousands of miles of real-world data collected from both petrol and electric vehicles, we evaluate the performance of our optimization strategy with respect to our cost function. The system achieves performance within 10% of the optimal upper bound calculated using a priori knowledge of the upcoming loads. This performance implies improved battery thermal stability, efficiency, and longevity. Our strategy can be applied to optimize energy use in gas-electric hybrids, battery cooling in electric vehicles, and many other load-sensitive tasks in transportation.