Electric vehicles based on brushless motors have emerged as a promising alternative for the automotive industry to replace combustion models. A growing concern, however, is related to energy efficiency both in terms of consumption and recharging time. This fosters the development of on-the-fly auxiliary charging approaches to delay recharging as much as possible. One plausible alternative is harnessing energy from braking, called regenerative braking. This technique requires an enhanced operation of the frequency inverter, as it needs a different switching logic for the braking moments, which makes the programming more complex. This paper tests a Discrete Event System (DES) strategy to design, specify, and control a brushless motor, considering the energy savings from the precise handling of regenerative braking events. After modeling and obtaining a DES controller, as a result of applying Supervisory Control Theory (SCT) processed over a variable-based automata framework, we further transfer the controller logic to a simulator to quantify gains.
