The system has been designed and implemented for Spanish’ DGAM (Dirección General de Armamento y Material del Ministerio de Defensa). DGAM is working in the design and technology tests for a future 8x8 armoured vehicle in the 2012 -2015 horizon: the FSCT (Futuro Sistema de Combate Terrestre); the project is also in line with the objectives of the European Defense Agency (EDA) for the design of a complete, multifunctional family of transport vehicles. Since 2006, GTD has been developing a new generation of Energy Management System for multipurpose, hybrid ground vehicles. The objective has been to use enhanced contextual information (regarding scenario, mission definition, threats, …) in order to improve traditional energy management strategies. The energy management system delivered by GTD addresses the following functionalities: · A multipurpose, flexible energy plant modeller in order to adapt the energy management functionality to the widest range of vehicles and scenarios. · A contextual simulator in order to convey into the system geography, meteorology and other meaningful objects and events. · Specifically designed Human Machine Interfaces enhancing man-machine communication in complex scenarios. · And the “MAGE”, which is the Artificial Intelligence module in charge of evaluating the scenario conditions and decide on energy usage, generation, storage, … MAGE, based on Knowledge Enabled Services (KESgtd) technology, predicts and solves in advance “energy availability conflicts”, thus combining both tactic, short term requirements, with strategic, long term energy provision. The system does continuously estimate energy requirements in multiple mission horizons, bringing mission, geography, meteorology and threats into the analysis. A full new man-machine communication paradigm has been developed in order to be effective in conveying decision and decision justification, produced by the Artificial Intelligence module, to the crew.
