Aging-Aware Battery Control via Convex Optimization

Abstract

We consider the task of controlling a battery while balancing two competing objectives that evolve over different time scales. The short-term objective, such as arbitrage or load smoothing, improves with more battery cycling, while the long-term objective is to maximize battery lifetime, which discourages cycling. Using a semi-empirical aging model, we formulate this problem as a convex optimization problem. We use model predictive control (MPC) with a convex approximation of aging dynamics to optimally manage the trade-off between performance and degradation. Through simulations, we quantify this trade-off in both economic and smoothing applications.