Electric Vehicle Energy Management via Traffic Light Detection and Segmental Velocity Forecasting

Predictive-based power control has been widely recognized as a promising approach to boost driving range and improve system-level energy efficiency for electric vehicles (EVs), in which vehicle velocity forecasting generally serves as a preliminary input to optimally schedule the operations of varying onboard electrical and thermal systems. A segment-based velocity forecasting approach for individual commuting vehicles developed in this study reveals that it is challenging to forecast the velocity at intersection segments only using the velocity data. To address this challenge, this study seeks to develop a YOLO-V2-based object detection deep network to recognize the traffic lights in advance and leverage the detected signals to establish a forecasting model that integrates with the probability-based hybrid forecasting approach. The case study results show that the traffic light detection-based forecasting model can significantly improve the forecasting accuracy for intersection segments. Based on the forecasting velocity 5–15 s ahead, the effectiveness of model predictive control-based energy management strategy is further evaluated with a liquid-based battery thermal control system. The proposed battery thermal management system (BTMS) model shows promising results in maintaining battery temperature within an appropriate range, thus improving the overall energy efficiency of the EV. Moreover, a traffic light-based real-time energy management framework is developed to directly control the power demand from the air conditioning (AC) system.