Minimizing the Operating Cost of a Hybrid Multi-Stack Fuel Cell Vehicle Based on a Predictive Hierarchical Strategy

The operating cost of multi-stack fuel cell (FC) hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) is notably affected by the energy management strategy (EMS). For this purpose, this study proposes a predictive hierarchical (PH)-EMS to decrease the multi-stack FC-HEV operating cost. The PH-EMS consists of two levels. The first level is a Sugeno-type fuzzy logic (FL)-EMS that determines the number of active FCs for participation in an optimization level based on the vehicle's future velocity. The second level is the model predictive control (MPC) approach, which distributes the optimal power among FCs and the battery based on the number of active FCs and predicted velocity in the prediction horizon. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed EMS, the results are compared to a rule-based (RB) EMS. The results indicate that the total operating cost of the PH-EMS is 55.504% lower compared to RB-EMS.