The HVAC system represents the main auxiliary load in battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) and requires efficient control approaches that balance energy saving and thermal comfort. On the one hand, passengers always demand more comfort, but on the other hand the HVAC system consumption strongly impacts the vehicle’s driving range, which constitutes a major concern in BEVs. In this paper, a thermal comfort management approach that optimizes the thermal comfort while preserving the driving range during a trip is proposed. The electric vehicle is first modeled together with the HVAC and the passengers’ thermo-physiological behavior. Then, the thermal comfort management issue is formulated as an optimization problem solved by dynamic programing. Two representative test-cases of hot climates and traffic situations are simulated. In the first one, the energetic cost and ratio of improved comfort is quantified for different meteorological and traffic conditions. The second one highlights the traffic situation in which a trade-off between the driving speed and thermal comfort is important. A large number of weather and traffic situations are simulated and results show the efficiency of the proposed approach in minimizing energy consumption while maintaining a good comfort.

The HVAC system represents the main auxiliary load in electric vehicles, but passengers’ thermal comfort expectations are always increasing. Hence, a compromise is needed between energy consumption and thermal comfort. The present paper proposes a real-time thermal comfort management strategy that adapts the thermal comfort according to the energy available for operating the HVAC system. The thermal comfort is evaluated thanks to the “Predicted Mean Vote”, representative of passenger’s thermal sensations. Based on traffic and weather predictions for a given trip, the algorithm first estimates the energy required for the traction and the energy available for thermal comfort. Then, it determines the best thermal comfort that can be provided in these energetic conditions and controls the HVAC system accordingly. The algorithm is tested for a wide variety of meteorological and traffic scenarios. Results show that the energy estimators have a good accuracy. The absolute relative error is about 1.7% for the first one (traction), and almost 4.1% for the second one (thermal comfort). The effectiveness of the proposed thermal comfort management strategy is assessed by comparing it to an off-line optimal control approach based on dynamic programming. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is near-optimal, with a slight increase of discomfort by only 3%.

Nowadays, electric vehicles (EV) are increasingly penetrating the transportation roads in most countries worldwide. Many efforts are oriented toward the deployment of the EVs infrastructures, including those dedicated to intelligent transportation and electro-mobility as well. For instance, many Moroccan organizations are collaborating to deploy charging stations in mostly all Moroccan cities. Furthermore, in Morocco, EVs are tax-free, and their users can charge for free their vehicles in any station. However, customers are still worried by the driving range of EVs. For instance, a new driving style is needed to increase the driving range of their EV, which is not easy in most cases. Therefore, the need for a companion system that helps in adopting a suitable driving style arise. The driving range depends mainly on the battery’s capacity. Hence, knowing in advance the battery’s state-of-charge (SoC) could help in computing the remaining driving range. In this paper, a battery SoC forecasting method is introduced and tested in a real case scenario on Rabat-Salé-Kénitra urban roads using a Twizy EV. Results show that this method is able to forecast the SoC up to 180 s ahead with minimal errors and low computational overhead, making it more suitable for deployment in in-vehicle embedded systems.