Electric Drivetrain Optimization for 48V Urban Vehicles

This paper presents an optimization framework to determine the optimal sizing of main drivetrain components in a 48V battery electric vehicle applied for urban freight transport applications under a European project, namely URBANIZED. An evolutionary algorithm, NSGA-II, is adopted to solve a multi-objective optimization problem, which is formulated for the energy consumption and drivetrain cost of the vehicle. To evaluate the contradictory objective functions, a forward-facing and scalable vehicle model is developed for the integration into the optimization sizing loop considering different transport assignments. Comparative simulation results between optimized and baseline vehicles are provided and analyzed.