A smartphone-in-the-loop active state-of-charge manager for electric vehicles

Environmental concerns and the steadily decreasing oil supplies have promoted a significant interest in electric vehicles as a solution for the mobility of the near future, especially in urban environments. The correct handling of the energy behavior on board is one of themost critical problems to be addressed, particularly in urban driving scenarios where the speed profiles—even on fixed routes—are affected by significant unknown disturbances. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel, spatially distributed and hierarchical control architecture that is capable of regulating the battery state of charge by imposing a desired discharge rate. The effectiveness of the overall control system is assessed by experimental results obtained on a prototype of a light-electric two-wheeled vehicle.