During the past two decades desperate need for energy-efficient vehicles which has less emission have led to a great attention to and development of electrified vehicles like pure electric, Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs). Resultantly, a great amount of research efforts have been dedicated to development of control strategies for this type of vehicles including PHEV which is the case study in this thesis.

This thesis presents a real-time control scheme to improve the fuel economy of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) by accounting for the instantaneous states of the system as well as the future trip information. To design the mentioned parametric real-time power management policies, we use dynamic programming (DP). First, a representative power-split PHEV powertrain model is introduced, followed by a DP formulation for obtaining the optimal powertrain trajectories from the energy cost point of view for a given drive cycle. The state and decision variables in the DP algorithm are selected in a way that provides the best tradeoff between the computational time and accuracy which is the first contribution of this research effort. These trajectories are then used to train a set of linear maps for the powertrain control variables such as the engine and electric motor/generator torque inputs, through a least-squares optimization process. The DP results indicate that the trip length (distance from the start of the trip to the next charging station) is a key factor in determining the optimal control decisions. To account for this factor, an additional input variable pertaining to the remaining length of the trip is considered during the training of the real-time control policies. The proposed controller receives the demanded propulsion force and the powertrain variables as inputs, and generates the torque commands for the engine and the electric drivetrain system. Numerical simulations indicate that the proposed control policy is able to approximate the optimal trajectories with a good accuracy using the real-time information for the same drive cycles as trained and drive cycle out of training set. To maintain the battery state-of-charge (SOC) above a certain lower bound, two logics have been introduced a switching logic is implemented to transition to a conservative control policy when the battery SOC drops below a certain threshold. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in achieving near-optimal performance while maintaining the SOC within the desired range.