Wayne State Receives $1.2 Million NSF Grant to Develop Autonomous Battery Operating System

DETROIT - The future of innovation will rely on effective, integrative battery operating systems that provide sustained and reliable power. Emerging technologies such as electric-drive vehicles and stationary energy storage systems will require improved battery systems.

Software-controlled battery management systems will play a crucial role in enabling continued innovation, but currently these systems face design challenges. These include decreasing capacity of batteries over time due to aging and the need for future battery management systems to include autonomous reasoning capabilities to make economically sound decisions, such as scheduling battery charging times in a personalized fashion.

Researchers at Wayne State University led by Nathan Fisher, associate professor of computer science in the College of Engineering, received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to address these issues.

The project, "Autonomous Battery Operating System: An Adaptive and Comprehensive Approach to Efficient, Safe and Secure Battery System Management," aims to inject intelligence capabilities into battery management system design with the development of the Autonomous Battery Operating System (ABOS).

"ABOS will enable more energy-efficient, long-lasting and secure battery-driven systems," said Fisher. "An ABOS will learn and adapt to user-initiated charging/discharging patterns, determine how these patterns affect a battery's health, and respond to potential faults or attacks."

Fisher and his team of researchers will develop a simulated electrical vehicle and will interact with an actual battery system so that researchers can study the effectiveness of ABOS in a realistic environment to test its ability to control a physical battery system. The simulation environment will evaluate the effectiveness of ABOS in predicting battery state and in minimizing cost of operation and handling failures and threats.

Collaborators from Wayne State University's Department of Computer Science include Weisong Shi, Ph.D., professor; Daniel Grosu, Ph.D., associate professor; and Fengwei Zhang, Ph.D. The number for this National Science Foundation grant is 1724227.

EurekAlert!, the online, global news service operated by AAAS, the science society: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/wsu--wsr092017.php