Thermal management optimization of Battery Electric Vehicles via hierarchical NMPC with CMO-trained Neural Models

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of energy-efficient thermal management in Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), with the goal of extending driving range while ensuring passenger comfort and battery thermal safety. A hierarchical Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework is proposed, in which the supervisory layer explicitly balances energy consumption and cabin temperature reference tracking over a long horizon and translates this trade-off into optimal actuator command sequences for the integrated heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system and the battery thermal management (BTM) system. These command sequences are then enforced by a lower-layer NMPC, which introduces local corrections to compensate disturbances and modeling uncertainty while tracking an externally specified cabin temperature reference trajectory. To enable predictive control of the highly nonlinear and strongly coupled thermal dynamics, data-driven neural network models are employed as prediction models within both control layers. The proposed approach is developed and validated using a high-fidelity BEV thermal simulator developed at Politecnico di Torino in collaboration with Stellantis N.V., and benchmarked against an industrial rule-based (RB) control strategy over the WLTC driving cycle. Simulation results demonstrate a significant reduction in energy consumption compared to the baseline strategy, while satisfying comfort and battery temperature constraints.