Discharge current steering for battery lifetime optimization

Recent work on battery-driven power management has demonstrated that sequential discharge is suboptimal in multi-battery systems, and lifetime can be maximized by distributing (steering) the current load on the available batteries, thereby discharging them in a partially concurrent fashion. Based on these observations, we formulate multi-battery life-time maximization as a continuous, constrained optimization problem, which can be efficiently solved by nonlinear optimizers. We show that great lifetime extensions can be obtained with respect to standard sequential discharge, as well to previously proposed battery allocation schemes.