Benefit of route recognition in energy management of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

This paper investigates the benefit of an energy management system that autonomously can recognize when a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle is driven along known commuting routes. The presented route recognition algorithm compares the GPS trajectory of the ongoing trip with stored commuting routes using the well known cross-correlation operation. If a route is recognized the energy management system switches from a charge depleting charge sustaining discharge strategy to a strategy where the battery discharge rate is adapted to the length of the recognized route, thereby decreasing the average discharge current and the resistive losses. The proposed system is evaluated using simulations on one month of logged commuter driving data. The results for an energy management system based on the equivalent consumption minimization strategy indicate an overall fuel cost reduction of 1.5% compared to an system that only utilize a charge depleting charge sustaining strategy.