Development of Energy Management Strategies for Heavy Mobile Machinery

This paper introduces a method for developing energy management strategies (EMS) for task-oriented heavy mobile machinery. The case application is a hybrid underground mining loader but the method is also used for a diesel-electric and electric loader. Depending on the optimization target, the sequence for optimal power-split between the engine-generator (gen-set) and battery is defined. The minimization of the energy consumption and maximization of the operating efficiency are used as the optimization targets. The developed method is based on dynamic programming simulations which generate the optimal power-split for the evaluation of the control parameters. The simulation results showed that there are no significant differences between the two optimization targets in terms of the control sequence of the hybrid loader. The major difference was observed in the battery charging power which was much lower in the case of the minimization of the energy consumption.