Environomic design of hybrid electric vehicles

The improvement of the efficiency of vehicle energy systems promotes an active search to find innovative solutions during the design process. Engineers can use computer-aided processes to find automatically the best design solutions. This kind of approach named “multi-objective optimization” is based on genetic algorithms. The idea is to obtain simultaneously a population of possible design solutions corresponding to the most efficient energy system definition for a vehicle. These solutions will be optimal from technical, economic and environmental point of view. The “genetic intelligence” is tested for the holistic design of the environomic vehicle powertrain solutions. The environomic methodology for design is applied on D-class hybrid electric vehicles, in order to define the powertrain configurations, to estimate the cost of the powertrain equipment and to show the environmental impact of the technical choices. The optimal designs are researched for the new European driving cycle.