Energy Management of Vehicles


Project Description

The project "Energy Management of Vehicles" (Energiemanagement im Kraftfahrzeug) is one of different interdisciplinary projects of the Munich Center of Automotive Research "CAR@TUM", which is a cooperation between BMW and the TU München. 5 institutes of the TU München are involved in Energy Management and each covers special fields of work. These are:

  • Technologies of the future, configuration and environment
  • Electrical components
  • Simulation
  • Combustion Engines
  • Optimization

The institutes, their tasks and contact persons are illustrated in the following picture:

In the project Energy Management, the interaction of components of vehicles is examined concerning energy flows and energy consumption. In this context, Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV’s) are considered. Many questions that arise are regarded with a model, built up with the simulation-tool “Dymola” mainly by LVK and EWT. For example, these questions are:

  • Component selection and configuration (energy storage, energy converters)
  • Component sizing
  • Control strategies of HEV’s
  • Potential of energy savings with different technologies

The main task of the “Lehrstuhl für Regelungstechnik” (Institute of Automatic Control) within the project consists of the Multi-Objective Optimization of solutions of the power train. That means, not only fuel consumption is considered, but also criterions like emissions, comfort, dynamics, costs and installation space are imaginable. The determination of objectives and procedures for finding optimal solutions is done in close cooperation between the participating institutes and BMW. The optimization regards especially:

  • Component sizing and configuration
  • Control strategies of Hybrid Electrical Vehicles

A Genetic Algorithm programmed in Matlab is used for finding pareto-optimal solutions. From this set of best compromises; the solution suiting best to the optimization-goals can be chosen.