Nonlinear MPC-based power management strategy for plug-in parallel hybrid electrical vehicles

For hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), fuel economy which is a significant performance index strongly depends on the power management strategy. In this paper, a new nonlinear MPC strategy is proposed to improve the fuel economy of a plug-in parallel hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). With the preview of the traffic and the battery state of charge (SoC) as well as all the physical constraints of the system, the power management control problem is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. A Continuous/GMRES method-based nonlinear MPC strategy is used to determine the power split ratios. Simulations over a real driving cycle is conducted on a HEV simulator built in the GT-Suite environment to evaluate the nonlinear MPC algorithm for real-time application.