Predictive cruise control for hybrid electric vehicles based on hierarchical convex optimization

Predictive Cruise Control (PCC) achieves automated driving with improved vehicle economy by incorporating road gradient information from high-precision maps. However, existing research on PCC has primarily centered around conventional gasoline vehicles. Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) offer superior fuel efficiency compared to their traditional counterparts. To further enhance vehicle economy by integrating the PCC system with HEVs, this paper proposes a hierarchical control architecture for HEV-PCC based on convex optimization. Firstly, considering spatial slope information from the road ahead, this paper introduces a Time-Space Integration Model Predictive Control (TSI-MPC) based on the principles of kinetic energy. Secondly, the paper combines a current regression model with the Pontryagin Minimum Principle (PMP) to present a Regression Analysis - Pontryagin Minimum Principle (RA-PMP) approach for the direct analytical solution of the energy management problem. Finally, the strategy is validated through simulation analysis and Hardware-in-Loop (HIL) testing on various real road scenarios. The result indicate that, in comparison to the Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (ECMS) with constant speed cruising (CC), this method achieves an average fuel economy improvement of 9.45%.