A Decentralized Model Predictive Control Approach to Power Management of a Fuel Cell-Ultracapacitor Hybrid

This paper presents an application of decentralized model predictive control (MPC) to a fuel cell-ultracapacitor hybrid. Dedicated subsystem level MPC controllers are developed that control a fuel cell and an ultracapacitor current and enforce point-wise-in-time constraints of each subsystem independently of each other. A simple supervisory scheme determines the power split between the fuel cell and the ultracapacitor. Nonlinear simulations show that the decentralized control design is successful in enforcing subsystem level constraints while achieving system-level power demand. The proposed decentralized approach has practical advantages over a centralized MPC design because of its potential to decrease online computations and more importantly because of its compatibility with a modular software/hardware architecture.