A Multi-Stage Energy Management System for Multi-Source Hybrid Electric Vehicles

A Multi-Stage Energy Management System (MSEMS) is presented in this paper; it aims at optimizing the operating costs of multi-source Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) supplied by a Fuel Cell (FC), batteries, supercapacitors and the electric grid. In particular, based on a given HEV cost function, the first stage of the proposed MS-EMS is devoted to FC management as its optimization does not depend on the other energy sources. Then, the second stage of MS-EMS splits the residual power demand among the remaining energy sources optimally, by considering their availability and HEV operating constraints. The reference powers of these energy sources are then tracked by the third stage of MS-EMS, which addresses also DC-link voltage regulation needs through a priority-based deadbeat predictive control approach. The effectiveness of the proposed MS-EMS is proved by a simulation study, which regards the comparison with a rule-filter-based EMS.