According to the successful development of hybrid vehicle, hybridization of construction equipments like excavator, wheel loader, and backhoe etc., is gaining increasing attention. However, hybridization of excavator and commercial vehicle is very different. Therefore a specialized energy management control algorithm for excavator should be developed. In this paper, hybridization of excavators is investigated and a new energy management control algorithm is proposed. Four control parameters, i.e., lower baseline, upper baseline, idling generation speed, and idling generation torque, are newly introduced and a new operating principle using those four control parameters is proposed. The use of Genetic Algorithm for the optimization of the four control parameters from the view point of minimization of fuel consumption for standard excavating operation is suggested. In order to verify the proposed algorithm, dedicated simulation program of hybrid excavator was developed. The proposed algorithm is applied to a specific hydraulic excavator and 20.7% improvement of fuel consumption is achieved.
