SystemC-AMS Simulation of Energy Management of Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EV) are rapidly invading the market, since they are clean, quiet and energy efficient. However, there are many factors that discourage EVs for current and potential customers. Among them, driving range is one of the most critical issues: running out of battery charge while driving results in serious inconvenience even comparable to vehicle breakdown, as an effect of long fuel recharging times and lack of charging facilities. As a result, the dimensioning of the energy subsystem of an EV is a crucial activity. The choice of the power components and of the adopted policies should thus be validated at design time through simulations, that estimate the vehicle driving range under reference driving profiles. It is thus necessary to build a simulation framework that takes into account an EV power consumption model, dependent on the characteristics of the vehicle and of the driving route, plus accurate models for all power components, including batteries and green power sources. The goal of this paper is to achieve early EV simulation, so that the designer can estimate at design time the driving range of the vehicle, validate the adopted components and policies and evaluate alternative configurations

A Framework for Efficient Evaluation and Comparison of EES Models

Electrical energy systems (EES) are systems which consume, generate, distribute and store energy at various scales, ranging from smart systems-on-chip to smart grids. Simulation of EES is a critical task, as it allows to validate system dimensioning and to foresee system lifetime under specific load conditions. This paper proposes a modeling and simulation framework based on the standard language SystemC. The framework is designed for enhancing EES simulation with a high modularity. This allows to evaluate alternative models for EES components, to determine a tradeoff between accuracy and simulation performance. The pa- per formalizes energy and information flows by defining interfaces for the typical components of EESs (e.g., energy storage devices, power sources, converters). Then, it proposes a methodology to seamlessly plug such components into the simulation framework, by adopting models at different levels of detail. Simulations highlight effectiveness and modularity of the proposed approach and prove its accuracy with a comparison w.r.t. Matlab/Simulin