Electric wheel-drive multi-axle heavy-duty vehicles have the characteristics of strong maneuverability and good passability, thereby they are widely used in heavy equipment transportation. However, current research on the composite braking of multi-axle heavy-duty vehicles is rare, which is not conducive to improving braking performance and braking energy utilization efficiency. This work proposes a multi-mode composite braking control strategy for the five-axle distributed electric wheel-drive heavy-duty vehicle. Firstly, given the differences in braking dynamics between two-axle vehicles and multi-axle vehicles, the brake dynamics characteristics of multi-axle vehicles are analyzed, and the vehicle dynamics model of multi-axle vehicles is constructed. Next, a multi-mode composite braking control strategy including a fully electric braking state and hybrid electro–hydraulic braking state is proposed in order to improve the braking energy recovery and braking stability. Finally, a hardware-in-the-loop simulation system is established, and the single-braking conditions and China heavy-duty commercial vehicle test cycle-heavy truck (abbreviated as CHTC-HT) are conducted to verify the performance of the braking control strategy. The results indicate that the recaptured braking energy and braking stability are significantly increased by applying the control strategy proposed in this work.

Four-wheel-drive electric vehicles with multiple motors have several advantages such as energy saving, environmental protection, and excellent dynamics performance. Therefore, they have become an important development trend in the field of electric vehicles in the past few years. To deal with the problems of the economy and dynamics optimization of an electric vehicle with dual motors on the front axle and a single motor on the rear axle, a multi-mode drive optimization control strategy based on the hierarchical control architecture is proposed in this paper. In the strategy, the reference torque distribution strategy of the front and rear motors is obtained by optimizing the instantaneous energy consumption power in the economy module, and a torque compensation strategy is formulated based on the fuzzy control in the dynamics module to improve the vehicle dynamics in high dynamics demand conditions. Finally, the closed-loop cycle test and the driver-in-the-loop test are carried out to verify the performance of the strategy proposed in this paper, and the results show that energy consumption is reduced by 6.45% in the World Harmonized Light-duty Vehicles Test Cycle (WLTC), and that vehicles accelerate more quickly in variable acceleration conditions under the proposed strategy.