Start-stop system for a city bus based on model predictive control

Abstract

Start-stop system of an internal combustion system of a hybrid drive is designed to reduce energy consumption of the drive and reduce the produced emissions. Effectiveness of the start-stop system heavily depends on its ability to correctly predict when the combustion engine will be idle. This makes the problem suitable for model predictive control. In this contribution, we study the case of a hybrid city bus for which we have available recorded profiles of power consumption from repeated drives of the same route. We propose to use these historical data as predictions of the power consumption in the predictive control approach. We show in simulation with recorded data, that the resulting model predictive start-stop system outperforms the rule based approach and yield fuel savings of 5% and operational cost over 2%.