Analyzing Drive Cycles for Hybrid Electric Vehicle Simulation and Optimization

Abstract

System design tools including simulation and component optimization are an increasingly important component of the vehicle design process, placing more emphasis on early stages of design to reduce redesign and enable more robust design. This study focuses on the energy use and power management simulations used in vehicle design and optimization. Vehicle performance is most often evaluated in simulation, physical testing, and certification using drive cycle cases (also known as dynamometer schedules or drive schedules). In vehicle optimization studies, the information included in each drive cycle has been shown to influence the attributes of the optimized vehicle, and including more drive cycles in simulation optimizations has been shown to improve the robustness of the optimized design. This paper aims to quantitatively understand the effect of drive cycles on optimization in vehicle design and to specify drive cycles that can lead to robust vehicle design with minimal simulation. Two investigations are performed in service of this objective; investigation 1 tests how different combinations of drive cycles affect optimized vehicle performance and design variables (DV); investigation 2 evaluates the use of stochastic drive cycles for improving the robustness of vehicle designs without adding computational cost to the design and optimization process.