A New Energy Management Strategy for Multimode Power-Split Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Among the hybrid electric vehicle categories, the multimode power-split allows to fully exploit the advantages related to the powertrain electrification. However, together with the increased flexibility, it comes with greater difficulty in defining an effective control strategy, both in terms of predicted fuel consumption and computational cost. To overcome the limits of the most diffused energy management strategies, slope-weighted energy-based rapid control analysis (SERCA) has been recently proposed. Nevertheless, so far, the algorithm has been applied to powertrains characterized by two operative modes solely. In this paper, we first present the inconsistency of SERCA applied to the whole set of multimode power-split arrangements. Subsequently, after correlating this divergence to the mode selection process, to overcome this draft, we introduce a novel strategy called SERCA(+). This algorithm is proven to be robust and to achieve results close to the optimum benchmark with an insignificant increase in computational cost. Therefore, SERCA(+) could potentially find application in design methodologies for multimode power-split HEVs to accelerate the overall vehicle design process.