Development of powertrain controller platform for electric vehicles based on abstraction layer structure

Various types of electric vehicles have been developed so far, including pure electric car, serial/ parallel hybrid electric car and serial/ parallel hybrid electric bus and so on. Traditionally, a controller is designed for a particular type of electric vehicle. However, on the basis of CAN bus, powertrain controller platform is currently being developed to meet the demand of different electric vehicles. In this paper, the hardware’s abstraction layer structure of powertrain controller platform suitable for those electric vehicles is studied on three kinds of electric vehicles, of which the networking control systems are introduced beforehand. The hardware’s platform is configured and is highly reliable with OBD. The software is abstracted into three layers to ensure good configuration. Each layer is well defined for the powertrain controller to be divided into manageable sub-functions that can be further split into individual tasks. Therefore appropriate control tasks can be selected for particular vehicles. At the same time, these tasks can be specified, coded, and tested individually. HIL (hardware in the loop) test and Experiments show that the controller platform can meet the need of different kinds of electric vehicles.