Wheel torque distribution optimization of four-wheel independent-drive electric vehicle for energy efficient driving

With the help of several in-wheel motors, four-wheel independent-drive electric vehicle (4WIDEV) has tremendous potential to improve vehicle performance. Except for the theme of stability enhancement during the past two decades, energy saving topic becomes more attractive recently. However, it is difficult to achieve stability and economy performance simultaneously. Given the commonly used control method of rigid yaw rate tracking may limit the energy saving potential of 4WIDEV in cornering. Therefore, be different from previous studies which often focus on a sole target, in this paper, a driving energy management strategy for 4WIDEV based on multi-objective online optimization of four-wheel torque distribution is proposed in this paper, which includes weighted yaw rate tracking error into its parameterized control objectives besides electric drive system efficiency, tire slip losses and wheel torque ripple. Meanwhile, for better coordination of stability and economy in different situation, fuzzy logic control is adopted to dynamically adjust the weight of the control objective indexes of the proposed multi-objective online optimization function. Then, a particle swarm optimization algorithm is adopted to solve the optimization function. Finally, the proposed strategy for energy-efficient driving is verified based on the built Simulink and CarSim co-simulation model. The results show that the proposed four-wheel torque distribution strategy based on the multi-objective online optimization is more effective than average distribution strategy and offline optimization strategy.