Physics-Informed Predictive Control for Integrated Electric-Vehicle Thermal Management: An Open, Real-Data-Anchored Benchmark

Abstract

Thermal management in a battery-electric vehicle (BEV) is a coupled, vehicle-level problem: the battery pack, the passenger cabin, the heat pump, and cabin air quality compete for shared actuation and energy, yet most studies optimise a single subsystem on proprietary models, which prevents fair, reproducible comparison. We present OpenEV-ThermoSciML, an open and reproducible benchmark that couples a battery electro-thermal-aging model, a two-node cabin model, a heat-pump/HVAC model, and a CO$_2$/ventilation model under real driving cycles (EPA) and real weather (NREL TMY3, NASA POWER), scored by a multi-objective suite spanning battery health, PMV/PPD comfort, cabin air quality, and HVAC energy. The benchmark's battery thermal core is anchored and validated on real BEV battery-management-system (BMS) data; the reduced battery (two-state) and cabin (two-node) models are validated against converged higher-fidelity references and, for the cabin, independently cross-checked against EnergyPlus 25.2.0. On top of the benchmark we develop a physics-informed scientific-machine-learning (Sci-ML) surrogate -- a nominal-physics prior plus a learned residual with conservation penalties -- that is exact on conserved quantities and dominates black-box and Koopman surrogates out-of-distribution (overall rollout RMSE 0.014 vs 1.168 and 3.991). A shielded Sci-ML model-predictive controller (MPC) delivers statistically significant, all-positive improvements over a production-like rule-based controller across six scenarios -- including a real hot-day US06 trip (energy $-15\%$, comfort RMSE $-47\%$, peak CO$_2$ $-25\%$, battery thermal-gradient $-78\%$) -- and these gains transfer to an independently exported OpenModelica 8-node co-simulation plant.