A novel hybrid PI–backstepping cascade controller for battery–supercapacitor electric vehicles considering various driving cycles scenarios

The integration of supercapacitors as hybrid energy storage systems in electric vehicles has attracted the attention of many researchers and has been considered as a promising solution. Bidirectional DC/DC converters (BDDCs) play a fundamental role in HESS, as they manage the power flow by controlling currents and regulating the DC bus voltage. However, they encounter the challenge of uncertainties and high fluctuation power loads, necessitating the fast dynamics, stability, and high robustness of the controller. This paper proposes a novel hybrid proportional–integral and backstepping cascade controller to regulate the DC-bus voltage under uncertainties and load variations, and to control the current references of the on-boarded sources. To confirm the asymptotic stability of the whole system, a nonlinear stability analysis is conducted using the Lyapunov theorem. A power management strategy is applied to distribute the power loads and generate reference currents for the BDDCs controller. Simulations results under various driving cycles using MATLAB/Simulink demonstrate the superiority of the proposed controller compared to conventional proportional–integral and backstepping controllers. A real-time controller-hardware-in-the-loop test bench is developed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.