Adaptive control strategy for hybrid electric vehicles

As the demand for more fuel efficient vehicles increases, hybrid electric vehicles are gaining in popularity. However, the hybrids currently offered are far from fully utilizing their fuel saving potential, although they are more efficient than their conventional counterparts. The reason for not fully utilizing the potential of hybrids lays in the controller used in virtually all of them. In this paper, a new control strategy is proposed that is based on stochastic dynamic programming but can be used for real time applications because of the predictive algorithm used with it. This strategy achieves about ten percent increase in fuel efficiency in most drive cycles over a rule based control strategy.