Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) have become an active research area for both the academia and the automotive industry. The goal of HEV development is to improve fuel efficiency and reduce harmful emissions. With these motivations, an HEV simulator was developed for the FutureCar student project at The Ohio State University. The simulator was designed to predict the vehicle performance with respect to maximum acceleration, top vehicle speed and fuel economy. This simulator was then chosen as a generic model to be used in the project of “Design-Space Exploration” sponsored by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
During the course of the DARPA project, some limitations and mistakes of the existing HEV simulator were found through repeated runs on the simulator. At the same time, several modules in the HEV simulator were rewritten to accommodate the need of the DARPA project…