Toward consensus-based balancing of smart batteries

Smart reconfigurable battery systems allow access to individual cells for monitoring and control purposes, enabling an efficient and flexible energy management among cells that can also be used for voltage balancing. This paper studies consensus protocols and cooperative control tools to illustrate the use of distributed control strategies for voltage balancing in such reconfigurable battery systems. By considering the individual cell as agents, the voltage balancing problem can be reformulated as a consensus problem. In case of leaderless consensus, the criteria required to obtain average consensus is discussed. Moreover, in case of leader-follower consensus approach, the leader selection and its impact on the time-to-reach consensus is analyzed. Several case studies are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.