Modelling and design of real-time energy management systems for fuel cell/battery electric vehicles

Modelling and design of real-time energy management systems for optimising the operating costs of a fuel cell/battery electric vehicle are presented in this paper. The proposed energy management system consists of optimally sharing the propulsion power demand between the fuel cell and battery by enabling them to support each other for operating cost minimisation. The optimisation is achieved through real-time minimisation of a cost function, which accounts for fuel cell and battery degradation, hydrogen consumption and charge sustaining costs. Adetailed analysis of each term of the overall cost function is performed and presented, which enables the development of a real-time, advanced energy management system for improving a previously presented simplified version using more accurate modelling and by considering cost function minimisation over a given time horizon. The performance of the proposed advanced energy management system are verified through numerical simulations over different driving cycles; particularly, simulations were performed in MATLAB-Simulink by considering a hysteresis-based energy management system and both simplified and advanced versions of the proposed energy management system for comparison.