Design of a Recommender System with Safe Driving Mode Based on State-of-Function Estimation in Electric Vehicle Drivetrains with Battery/Supercapacitor Hybrid Energy Storage System

The performance of electric vehicle (EV) drivetrains depends on the power capability of individual components, including the battery pack, motor drive, and electric motor. To ensure safety, maximum power must be limited by considering the constraint of the weakest component in the drivetrain. While there exists a large body of work that discusses state-of-power (SoP) estimation for individual components, there is no work that considers all the components’ limiting factors at once. Moreover, research on how to use these limits to adjust the performance at the system level has been rare. In this paper, the SoPs of the components are used to estimate the state-of-function (SoF) of the EV drivetrain. The SoF is defined as the maximum charge/discharge power that can be sourced and/or sunk by the drivetrain without violating the safety limits of its components. The component-level SoP estimations are fulfilled using several digital algorithms based on recursive least-squares (RLS) and Kalman filters (KFs), as well as by taking into account specific limiting conditions such as high driving altitude and ambient temperatures. An EV driven by a hybrid energy storage system based on a battery/supercapacitor, and a permanent-magnet synchronous motor is considered the use case. Based on the drivetrain SoF estimation, we propose two de-rating schemes to ensure that the drivetrain safety limits will be respected: adaptive cruise control and adaptive adjustment of pedal sensitivity. The de-rating schemes are introduced to a so-called recommender system that is implemented in MATLAB/STATEFLOW. The recommender system provides advisory feedback to the driver to switch to a different driving mode to ensure safety. The simulation results over a standard drive cycle using MATLAB/SIMULINK and STATEFLOW show the effectiveness of the proposed design at both component and system levels. The paper also proposes an implementation concept for the integration of the proposed recommender system into the advanced driver assistance system (ASAS).