Transfer Learning-based State of Health Estimation for Lithium-ion Battery with Cycle Synchronization

Accurately estimating a battery's state of health (SOH) helps prevent battery-powered applications from failing unexpectedly. With the superiority of reducing the data requirement of model training for new batteries, transfer learning (TL) emerges as a promising machine learning approach that applies knowledge learned from a source battery, which has a large amount of data. However, the determination of whether the source battery model is reasonable and which part of information can be transferred for SOH estimation are rarely discussed, despite these being critical components of a successful TL. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an interpretable TL-based SOH estimation method by exploiting the temporal dynamic to assist transfer learning, which consists of three parts. First, with the help of dynamic time warping, the temporal data from the discharge time series are synchronized, yielding the warping path of the cycle-synchronized time series responsible for capacity degradation over cycles. Second, the canonical variates retrieved from the spatial path of the cycle-synchronized time series are used for distribution similarity analysis between the source and target batteries. Third, when the distribution similarity is within the predefined threshold, a comprehensive target SOH estimation model is constructed by transferring the common temporal dynamics from the source SOH estimation model and compensating the errors with a residual model from the target battery. Through a widely-used open-source benchmark dataset, the estimation error of the proposed method evaluated by the root mean squared error is as low as 0.0034 resulting in a 77% accuracy improvement compared with existing methods.