Transfer Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Energy Management Strategy for Plug-In Hybrid Electric Heavy-Duty Trucks under Segmented Usage Scenarios

Energy management strategy (EMS) is a way to reduce the energy consumption of hybrid power systems. This article proposes a unique deep reinforcement learning- (DRL-) based EMS for plug-in hybrid electric heavy-duty trucks (PHETs), combining driving cycle pattern recognition (DPR) and deep transfer learning (DTL). The proposed EMS can cope well with the complex usage scenarios of PHETs and the difficulty of generating EMS. While ensuring the minimum overall driving cost, the strategy can improve the convergence speed of the DRL method and the generalizability under segmented usage scenarios. Firstly, representative driving cycles that reflect different usage scenarios are constructed based on a naturalistic data-driven method. Secondly, a plug-in hybrid electric heavy-duty truck (PHET) driving pattern recognizer based on a learning vector quantization neural network (LVQ) is built. Thirdly, the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm is innovatively combined with the DTL algorithm. The pretrained neural network in the corresponding usage scenarios is transferred to the natural driving cycles based on DTL. Moreover, the proposed EMS gives an emphasized consciousness on the battery degradation cost. Finally, the strategy is tested under natural driving cycles in different usage scenarios and proven through comparison with the current state-of-the-art techniques, deep reinforcement learning-based strategy, and dynamic programming (DP). The results show that the proposed strategy outperforms existing cutting-edge deep reinforcement learning techniques in terms of convergence speed, battery life extension, fuel consumption, and overall driving cost reduction. The proposed control strategy can improve the convergence speed by nearly 50%, while effectively extending the battery life and reducing the overall driving cost compared to the existing state-of-the-art strategies. The battery degradation rate is reduced by 48.46%, 57.95%, and 36.99%, and the driving cost is reduced by 17.76%, 8.51%, and 7.12%, respectively, under each usage scenario.