Real-Time Energy Management of Battery/Supercapacitor Electric Vehicles Based on an Adaptation of Pontryagin's Minimum Principle

The combination of batteries and supercapacitors is promising in electric vehicles context to minimize battery aging. Such a system needs an energy management strategy (EMS) that distributes energy in real-time for real driving cycles. Pontryagin's minimum principle (PMP) is widely used in adaptive forms to develop real-time optimization-based EMSs, thanks to its analytical approach. This methodology leads to an off-line optimal solution, which requires an extra adaptive mechanism for real-time applications. In this paper, a simplification of the PMP method is proposed to avoid the adaptation mechanism in real-time. This new EMS is compared to well-known conventional strategies by simulation. Furthermore, experimental results are provided to assess the real-time operation of the proposed EMS. Simulation and experimental results prove the advantages of the proposed approach by a reduction up to 50% of the batteries rms current on a real-world driving cycle compared to a battery-only EV.