A SystemC-AMS Framework for the Design and Simulation of Energy Management in Electric Vehicles

Driving range is one of the most critical issues for electric vehicles (EV): running out of battery charge while driving results in serious inconvenience even comparable to vehicle breakdown, as an effect of long fuel recharging times and lack of charging facilities. This may discourage EVs for current and potential customers. As an effect, the dimensioning of the energy subsystem of an EV is a crucial issue: the choice of the energy storage components and of the policies for their management should be validated at design time through simulations, so to estimate the vehicle driving range under reference driving profiles. It is thus necessary to build a simulation framework that takes into account an EV power consumption model, that accounts for the characteristics of the vehicle and of the driving route, plus accurate models for all power components, including batteries and renewable power sources. The goal of this paper is to achieve such early EV simulation, through the definition of a SystemC-AMS framework, that models simultaneously the physical and mechanical evolution, together with energy flows and environmental characteristics. The proposed solution extends a state-of-the-art framework for the simulation of electrical energy systems with support for mechanical descriptions and for the AC domain, by finding a good balance between accuracy and simulation speed and by formalizing the new information and energy flows. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy and simulation speed w.r.t. the current state-of-the-art, and its effectiveness at supporting EV design with enhanced exploration of the alternatives.