No abstract

The increasing interest into hybrid electric vehicles imposes the need to provide computational support for design choices during the development of these vehicles. This paper presents the use of a new methodology which allows for automatically generating topologically different hybrid powertrain concepts, and evaluating their performance. Since the energy management controller plays an important role in the performance assessment, a modular framework based on optimal control theory is used for assessing the closed-loop performance of different hybrid powertrain architectures. This paper illustrates how the concept generation methodology can be combined with optimal control in order to compare the closed-loop performance of a series and parallel hybrid powertrain.