Real-time coordinated control strategy for the hybrid electric propulsion system of a flying car with model adaptation and game theory

Coordination among the multiple power components is essential for the hybrid electric propulsion systems since the decision made by one impacts the state and decisions of others due to the coupling mechanical and electrical dynamics. Traditional model-based approaches with weight-sum objectives may result in misleading optimization or even unstable situations because of the inherent poor scalability and synergy. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a novel game theory-based control strategy with model adaptation mechanism for the hybrid electric flying car to enhance the control performance, system stability, and robustness. Firstly, a control-oriented model of the system is derived with the utilization of the recursive least square parameter estimation method. The non-cooperative game framework is then established with the turboshaft engine subsystem and electric supply subsystem treated as two independent players. The performance of Nash equilibrium solutions with closed-loop and open-loop information structures are investigated where the problem is iteratively solved by exploiting Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle and dynamic programming, respectively. The simulation results demonstrate that the game theory-based controllers can outperform MPC with the weight-sum objectives in terms of control efficiency and robustness improvement and the game theory-based controller with open-loop information structure shows excellent computation efficiency. Moreover, the result of the hardware-in-the-loop experiment demonstrates the real-time performance of the proposed controller.