Co-optimization of Speed and Gearshift Control for Battery Electric Vehicles Using Preview Information

Abstract: This paper addresses the co-optimization of speed and gearshift control for battery electric vehicles using short-range traffic information. To achieve greater electric motor efficiency, a multi-speed transmission is employed, whose control involves discrete-valued gearshift signals. To overcome the computational difficulties in solving the integrated speed-and-gearshift optimal control problem that involves both continuous and discrete-valued optimization variables, we propose a hierarchical procedure to decompose the integrated hybrid problem into purely continuous and discrete sub-problems, each of which can be efficiently solved. We show, by simulations in various driving scenarios, that the co-optimization of speed and gearshift control using our proposed hierarchical procedure can achieve greater energy efficiency than other typical approaches.