Co-optimization of speed planning and cost-optimal energy management for fuel cell trucks under vehicle-following scenarios

Fuel cell hybrid electric heavy-duty vehicles play a key role to realize green and low-carbon travel. To cope with actual traffic environment, an advanced energy management strategy (EMS) is crucial to ensure vehicle's efficiency and economy. In this paper, a predictive co-optimization control method is designed to achieve speed planning and energy management for the host vehicle with a fuel cell/Li-ion battery hybrid energy storage system under vehicle-following scenarios. Firstly, the host vehicle obtains the real-time speed of leading vehicle by communication technology, and speed prediction for the leading vehicle is implemented by fuzzy C-means clustering enhanced Markov Chain (FCM-MC) considering driving habits. Secondly, based on speed prediction results, the speed planning which aims to ensure safe inter-vehicle distance and minimize the demanded vehicular power is implemented to derive the speed curve of host vehicle. Finally, according to speed planning results, predictive energy management is applied to achieve power allocation between fuel cell (FC) and battery. The simulation results denote that the proposed speed prediction method can decrease forecast error effectively. The speed planning ensures the safe inter-vehicle distance. With speed prediction accuracy improved, the proposed hierarchical energy management strategy can reduce fuel cell degradation cost by 1.31%-3.48% and total operation cost by 0.75%-1.94%.