Energetic optimization of automotive thermal systems using mixed-integer programming and model predictive control

One of the biggest shortcomings of Electric Vehicles (EV) is related to the range of their battery. This problem can become even more crucial while using some important features of the car, such as those regarding the thermal comfort of the cabin. While highly efficient systems such as heat pumps can be used to overcome this problem, their performance can yet be optimized if combined with some other thermal actuators. To this aim, this paper proposes a Mixed-Integer optimization strategy based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). The results give substantial gains using both linear and non-linear models.