The powertrain efficiency of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) can be increased by effectively using the engine along the electric motor to gradually discharge the battery throughout a driving cycle. This sets the requirement of the optimal shaping of the battery state-of-charge (SoC) reference trajectory. The paper deals with the online synthesis of the optimal SoC reference trajectory, which inherently includes adaptive features in relation to the prediction of upcoming driving cycle features such as the trip distance, the road grade profile, the mean vehicle velocity and the mean demanded power. The method performs iteratively, starting from an offline-synthesized SoC reference trajectory obtained based on dynamic programming (DP) control variable optimization results. The overall PHEV control strategy incorporating the proposed online SoC reference trajectory synthesis method is verified against the DP benchmark and different offline synthesis methods. For this purpose, a model of a PHEV-type city bus is used and simulated over a wide range of driving cycles and conditions including varying road grade and low-emission zones (LEZ).

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