Learning to Calibrate Battery Models in Real-Time with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Lithium-ion (Li-I) batteries have recently become pervasive and are used in many physical assets. For the effective management of the batteries, reliable predictions of the end-of-discharge (EOD) and end-of-life (EOL) are essential. Many detailed electrochemical models have been developed for the batteries. Their parameters are calibrated before they are taken into operation and are typically not re-calibrated during operation. However, the degradation of batteries increases the reality gap between the computational models and the physical systems and leads to inaccurate predictions of EOD/EOL. The current calibration approaches are either computationally expensive (model-based calibration) or require large amounts of ground truth data for degradation parameters (supervised data-driven calibration). This is often infeasible for many practical applications. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework for reliably inferring calibration parameters of battery models in real time. Most importantly, the proposed methodology does not need any labeled data samples of observations and the ground truth parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework is capable of inferring the model parameters in real time with better accuracy compared to approaches based on unscented Kalman filters. Furthermore, our results show better generalizability than supervised learning approaches even though our methodology does not rely on ground truth information during training.