Sensitivity analysis of optimal energy management in plug-in hybrid heavy vehicles

Optimal energy management strategies of hybrid vehicles are computationally expensive when considering the entire trip ahead rather than a short upcoming horizon. Considering the entire representative trip is already needed in concept design stages of the vehicle. In order to come up with an appropriate design while minimizing the total ownership cost the energy management strategies must already be used together with early concept evaluations. To investigate the possibility of replacing the optimal energy management with simpler approaches, here, the sensitivity of optimal solution to some of vehicle parameters and traffic flow is studied. It is seen that a simpler approach, i.e. an instantaneous optimization, can be used, in case of smooth traffic flow, since the gain of optimal strategy in reduction of operational cost is less than 4% for different vehicle hardware setup and for selected representative driving cycle. Dynamic programming is used as a solution method for finding the optimal strategy.