Pedestrian-Aware Engine Management Strategies for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces pedestrian-aware engine management strategies for PHEVs that optimize environmental impact on pedestrians, integrating route uncertainties and real-world testing to enhance eco-friendly vehicle operation.

Contribution

It presents a novel optimization-based engine management approach that considers pedestrian environmental effects and route uncertainties in PHEVs.

Findings

Improved reduction in pedestrian environmental impact.

Effective handling of route-dependent uncertainties.

Successful implementation on real PHEV hardware-in-the-loop.

Abstract

Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) are increasingly being seen as a means of mitigating the pressing concerns of traffic-related pollution. While hybrid vehicles are usually designed with the objective of minimising fuel consumption, in this paper we propose engine management strategies that also take into account environmental effects of the vehicles to pedestrians outside of the vehicles. Specifically, we present optimisation based engine energy management strategies for PHEVs, that attempt to minimise the environmental impact of pedestrians along the route of the vehicle, while taking account of route dependent uncertainties. We implement the proposed approach in a real PHEV, and evaluate the performance in a hardware-in-the-loop platform. A variety of simulation results are given to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed approach.