Extended Range Electric Vehicle With Driving Behavior Estimation in Energy Management

Battery and energy management methodologies have been proposed to address the design challenges of driving range and battery lifetime in electric vehicles (EVs). However, the driving behavior is a major factor which has been neglected in these methodologies. In this paper, we propose a novel context-aware methodology to estimate the driving behavior in terms of future vehicle speeds and integrate this capability into EV energy management. We implement a driving behavior model using a variation of artificial neural networks called nonlinear autoregressive model with eXogenous inputs (NARX). We train our novel context-aware NARX model based on historical behavior of real drivers, their recent driving reactions, and route average speed retrieved from Google Maps in order to enable driver-specific and self-adaptive driving behavior modeling and long-term estimation. We analyze the estimation error of our methodology and its impact on a battery lifetime-aware automotive climate control, comparing to the state-of-the-art methodologies for various estimation window sizes. Our methodology shows only 12% error for up to 30-s speed prediction which is an improvement of 27% compared to the state-of-the-art. Therefore, the higher accuracy helps the controller to achieve up to 82% of the maximum energy saving and battery lifetime improvement achievable in ideal methodology where the future vehicle speeds are known.