Transfer Learning-Based Remaining Useful Life Prediction Method for Lithium-Ion Batteries Considering Individual Differences

With the wide utilization of lithium-ion batteries in the fields of electronic devices, electric vehicles, aviation, and aerospace, the prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) for lithium batteries is important. Considering the influence of the environment and manufacturing process, the degradation features differ between the historical batteries and the target ones, and such differences are called individual differences. Currently, lithium battery RUL prediction methods generally use the characteristics of a large group of historical samples to represent the target battery. However, these methods may be vulnerable to individual differences between historical batteries and target ones, which leads to poor accuracy. In order to solve the issue, this paper proposes a prediction method based on transfer learning that fully takes individual differences into consideration. It utilizes an extreme learning machine (ELM) twice. In the first stage, the relationship between the capacity degradation rate and the remaining capacity is constructed by an ELM to obtain the adjusting factor. Then, an ELM-based transfer learning method is used to establish the connection between the remaining capacity and the RUL. Finally, the prediction result is adjusted by the adjusting factor obtained in the first stage. Compared with existing typical data-driven models, the proposed method has better accuracy and efficiency.