Development of a Hybrid Electric Vehicle Simulation Tool with a Rule-Based Topology

The performance of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) greatly depends on the various sub-system components and their architecture, and designers need comprehensive reviews of HEVs before vehicle investigation and manufacturing. Simulations facilitate development of virtual prototypes that make it possible to rapidly see the effects of design modifications, avoiding the need to manufacture multiple expensive physical prototypes. To achieve the required levels of emissions and hardware costs, designers must use control strategies and tools such as computational modeling and optimization. However, most hybrid simulation tools do not share their principles and control logic algorithms in the open literature. With this motivation, the author developed a hybrid simulation tool with a rule-based topology. The major advantage of this tool is enhanced flexibility to choose different control and energy management strategies, enabling the user to explore a wide range of hybrid topologies. The tool provides the user with the ability to modify any sub-system according to one’s own requirements. In addition, the author introduces a simple logic control for a rule-base strategy as an example to show the flexibility of the tool in allowing the adaptation of any logic algorithm by the user. The results match the experimental data quite well. Details regarding modeling principle and control logic are provided for the user’s benefit.