Customer Data Driven PHEV Refuel Distance Modeling and Estimation

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) have an EV mode driving range which can cover a portion of customer daily driving. This EV mode range affects the refuel frequency substantially compared with conventional vehicle. For a conventional vehicle, daily driving pattern, tank size and fuel economy are the factors affecting the refuel frequency. While for a PHEV, EV range is another factor would affect the results substantially. Traditional method of label range can’t represent real world driving range between fill-ups for PHEV well. How to accurately predict the PHEV refuel distance taking into account real world customer driving patterns and PHEV parameters become critical for PHEV system design and optimization. This paper presents real world big customer data based PHEV refuel distance estimation modeling. The target is to estimate PHEV refuel distance given several specific parameters such as EV range, hybrid mode fuel economy, tank size etc. A big EuroFOT data set is used for the analysis and model development. Then a linear model is developed based on sensitivity analysis. The estimation results are compared with the NHTS data based estimation, and validated with the real world PHEV data. Finally an Neural Network based estimation model is proposed to further capture the non-linearity in the model and improve accuracy.