VEHICLE LEVEL CONTROL

While it is might be easy to develop a suboptimal advanced vehicle, significant expertise is necessary to develop a vehicle level control logic that minimizes fuel consumption and emissions while maintaining drive quality.  For electric drive vehicles, the vehicle level control decides:

• Engine (or fuel cell) ON/OFF
• Component operating conditions (i.e., torque, speed, current voltage)
• Shifting algorithm (when multi-gear transmission is present)
• Mode selection (e.g., input, compound or fixed gear in 2 Mode power split)
• Battery SOC control

To achieve that goal, numerous approaches are possible. Over the past decade, ANL’s Vehicle Modeling Simulation and Control group has developed and used numerous approaches, including:

• Global optimization (Dynamic Programming) (pdf)
• Rule based logic (pdf)
• Heuristic optimization (i.e., DIRECT = Divided Rectangle Algorithm, Genetic algorithm) (pdf)
• Instantaneous optimization (pdf)