Optimization-Based Energy Management Strategy for Hybrid-Electric Vehicles

Dear Colleagues,

Vehicle weights have been increasing, initially driven by progress in crashworthiness, and lately by the electrification of the vehicles. This additional weight increases the overall energy demand, resulting in reduced range and increased emissions. Limited raw materials combined with the need to reduce emissions, driven by the socio-political agendas requires manufacturers to devise systems that are more energy efficient.

Vehicle connectivity together with the wide use of navigation systems are offering a data-rich environment. The conversion of these data into useful information offers significant opportunities in terms of trip planning and for vehicle adaptation to its immediate environment. Such information can be exploited within optimization strategies to improve the energy management of the vehicle, including parasitic and comfort loads, as well as the traditional powertrain components.

Vehicle connectivity provides additional opportunities to carry out computationally intensive tasks on a distributed cloud environment. By contrast, the risk associated with software failure and malicious hacking is also increasing.

This Special Issue presents the interrelated challenges faced by manufacturers and solutions that can be currently implemented, as well as those on the horizon for delivering an optimal, safe, and secure optimization-based energy management strategy for hybrid-electric vehicles.

I would like to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue of the Electronics Journal, entitled Optimization-Based Energy Management Strategy for Hybrid-Electric Vehicles.

Specific Topics

It is expected that future hybrid vehicles will be fully connected, and will be designed to be highly efficient in term of powertrain system components and architecture, but also in the management of electrical energy usage and recovery based on trip knowledge. The development of 48V technology, enabling the reduction of mechanical drag torque and friction losses in the engine, by replacing mechanical with electrical components, will increase the vehicle electrical load. The increased amount of comfort and parasitic loads, combined with the improved ability to partially activate these loads offers new opportunities for load optimisation, to increase the range and reduce the emissions of hybrid electric vehicles.

Submissions can address the conceptual and applied research in hybrid-electric vehicles with focus on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Powertrain energy efficient
• Impact of parasitic and comfort load on overall powertrain energy management
• Impact of battery technology on powertrain management
• Vehicle trajectory prediction and energy management
• Model predictive control applied to powertrain energy management
• Nature inspired optimization applied to powertrain energy management
• On board vehicle systems for energy management
• Cloud-based energy management
• Battery technology and energy management
• Impact of 48 V system on energy management
• Energy management exploiting vehicle connectivity
• Formal verification of optimization-based energy management
• How to ensure correct and safe optimization-based software operations

Submissions should be of a high enough quality for an international journal, and should not be submitted or published elsewhere. However, the extended versions of conference papers that show significant improvement (minimum of over 30%) can be considered for review in this Special Issue. In addition, we welcome review papers covering the subjects of this Special Issue.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Olivier Haas
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Optimization
• Hybrid electric vehicle
• Intelligent
• Adaptive
• Predictive
• Safe
• Secure
• Power train
• Parasitic load
• Comfort load