Bi-Level Transfer Learning for Lifelong-Intelligent Energy Management of Electric Vehicles

Automotive energy management systems (EMSs) are evolving to achieve intelligence across their entire lifecycle, from initial product development to real-world customer usage. This paper proposes a bi-level transfer approach with model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) to realize cross-platform transferable and online-adaptive EMS. In the development phase, MAML calibrates the heuristic control maps of an instantaneous optimization-based EMS, with a per-unit state-action space design ensuring seamless knowledge transfer between vehicle platforms. During the usage phase, real driving data are adopted to refine onboard control parameters. The framework is validated through real vehicle experiments. Firstly, the entire MAML-assisted V-cycle development is implemented to validate the optimality and knowledge transfer of the EMS, resulting in zero-shot transfer for EMS calibration on new vehicle products. Additionally, real vehicle experimental tests show that a correction of 8.0%~9.5% fuel economy is improved against the convention reinforcement learning-based EMS during usage via online-adaptation, effectively bridging the gap between pre-trained policies and real-world optimal energy management.