Optimal Routing and Energy Management Strategies for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

This paper presents eco-routing strategies for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, whereby we jointly compute the routing and energy management strategy and the objective is a combination of travel time and energy consumption. Specifically, we first use Pontryagin's principle to compute the optimal Pareto front in terms of achievable fuel and battery consumption for different types of road links. Second, we leverage these Pareto fronts to formulate a network flow optimization problem to compute the optimal routing and energy management strategy, minimizing a combination of travel time and energy consumption. Finally, we present a real-world case-study for the Eastern Massachusetts highway subnetwork. The proposed approach allows to compute the optimal solution for different objectives, ranging from minimum time to minimum energy, revealing that by sacrificing a small amount of travel time significant improvements in fuel consumption can be achieved.