A Real-Time Energy Management Architecture for Multisource Electric Vehicles

This paper presents an energy management architecture for small urban electric vehicles based on hybrid energy sources and its real-time implementation. The energy management strategy uses an integrated rule-based metaheuristic approach to obtain solutions for sharing energy and power between two sources with different characteristics, namely, one with high specific energy and another with high specific power. A comprehensive real-time architecture for the energy management system is presented considering different management levels. The proposed approach determines an optimized real-time energy sharing between the sources without prior knowledge of the power demand profile. The multilevel energy management strategy has been validated using power-level reduced-scale hardware-in-the-loop simulations for a normalized urban driving cycle. The experimental results show the effectiveness of a real-time implementation based on particle swarm optimization supported by a set of rules restricting the search space. This strategy is effective in controlling the energy sources to work in their higher efficiency region and in satisfying the dynamic performance of the vehicle.