Comparative study of different energy management strategies for dual-source electric vehicles

This paper presents a comparative analysis between a pure battery electric vehicle and a dual-source electric vehicle endowed with a multi-level energy management strategy. The energy management of multi-source electric vehicles is a crucial aspect to obtain an effective contribution of the power sources, namely one with high specific energy and another with high specific power. This issue is particularly relevant for electric vehicles subject to high accelerations, breaking and those performing a large number of start and stop in its driving cycle. A comprehensive energy management system architecture with different management levels is presented and compared with a rule-based strategy (power disaggregation) and a pure battery electric vehicle. Simulations have been performed for two different urban driving cycles (NYCC and ARTEMIS low power urban) in order to validate and compare the effectiveness of the strategies under study. The results obtained show the usefulness of the proposed multi-level energy management strategy based on an integrated rule-based meta-heuristic approach versus an energy management strategy directed by the power disaggregation concept. The proposed approach increases the electric vehicle performance due to a better usage of the sources, which leads to a reduced installed power capacity.