Remaining useful life prediction of lithium battery
using convolutional neural network with optimized
parameters
1st Dongdong Li
School of Mechanical Engineering
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, China
lee_auto@163.com
Abstract—Accurately predicting remaining useful life (RUL)
of lithium battery with nonlinear characters is essential for
ensuring safety of applications. However, the diverse aging
mechanism gives the challenge for present technologies. In this
paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model is
constructed for RUL prediction of lithium battery. For reducing
the training time of CNN model, the orthogonal method is applied
for optimizing model parameters. Then, the proposed is validated
by a large dataset. And the accuracy of RUL prediction exceeds
90.9 percent while root mean square error and mean absolute
error are limited to 35.1 and 13.7, respectively. The proposed
method is suitable for RUL prediction of lithium battery applied
in electric vehicles and energy storage devices.
Keywords—remaining useful life, lithium battery, convolutional
neural network
I. INTRODUCTION
Lithium-ion batteries are widely used in electric vehicles
(EVs) for high energy density, long lifetimes and low costs [1,
2]. However, the system faults and safety accidents of vehicles
caused by aging failure of battery pose a great threat to
occupants and properties. Thus, the real-time monitoring and
management of battery states is needed to avoid the occurrence
of safety accidents. And the remaining useful life (RUL) of
battery is the key parameter to accurately predict and evaluate
the battery states [3, 4]. Because of dynamic loading and
variable working conditions, the non-linear characters of
lithium-ion battery pose a great challenge to the accurate
prediction of RUL.
At present, there are mainly two methods of RUL prediction
for lithium-ion batteries: model-based prediction [5-8] and data-
driven prediction [9-13]. The model-based approach requires the
construction of a mechanism model that describes the
degradation of the electrochemical reaction inside the battery
[14, 15]. However, the battery mechanism model has a
complicate structure which is difficult to completely consider
the influences of environment and loading conditions on battery
life. Thus, accurate mechanism modeling of battery is difficult.
The data-driven prediction method avoids the research on the
complex mechanism and electrochemical reaction process
inside the battery, and directly mines degradation information in
monitoring data of battery performances [16, 17]. Therefore,
data-driven method is currently the primary method for accurate
RUL prediction of lithium-ion battery.
This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (NSFC, Grant No. 51875339 and No. 51741707).
978-1-7281-5281-3/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
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2nd Lin Yang
School of Mechanical Engineering
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, China
yanglinsjtu@126.com
Among the data-driven methods for RUL prediction, the
neural network (NN) methods rely on the system complexity to
discover the relations among neural nodes. Due to the characters
of accurate generalization and learning of nonlinear relation
between data and output, the NN model is widely used in the
RUL prediction of lithium-ion battery. However, for feature
learning, not only enough raw data is needed, but also many
parameters are optimized for an accurate NN model. Therefore,
proper method is essential for selecting the main parameters and
modifying parameters to reduce the training time of NN model.
The contributions of this paper are twofold: a convolutional
neural network (CNN) model is constructed for RUL prediction
of lithium battery. Then the orthogonal method is applied for
optimizing CNN model parameters. And the proposed method
is validated with high accuracy.
II. RUL PREDICTION BY CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS
A. Structure of RUL Prediction
CNN can maximize the map relations between the input and
the output by extracting feature matrix. When the CNN model
is training, it can fully learn the feature matrix of input without
exacting mathematical expression between the input and the
output. After model trained, CNN has high performance of
features recognition for target prediction. Therefore, the CNN is
selected for RUL prediction. Comparing to other neural
networks, CNN benefits from three core ideas: local receptive
field, weight sharing mechanism, and pooling sample. The
framework of the RUL prediction by CNN is shown in Fig. 1.
Firstly, CNN uses sparse connection of local areas (local
area of filter) to reduce the number of parameters in the model
and the training time, and improve the performance of CNN.
Then, the convolution kernel of convolutional layer adopts
kernel parameter (weight of parameter) to finish convolution
operations. The weight matrix and the offset vector are shared,
which not only greatly reduces the number of network
parameters, but also improves the training efficiency of CNN.
Finally, pooling sample is formed as the pooling layer that
further reduces the output dimensions of feature matrix
extracted from convolutional layer. The local feature scaling of
the input feature matrix from previous layer is performed by
mean function of the pooling layer (maximum pooling, mean
pooling, etc.). So, the dimension of the feature matrix and
computational burden can be further reduced. On the other hand,
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pooling method can maximize the original features of input.
These three core ideas have greatly enhanced the performance
of CNN.
Fig. 1. The framework of the RUL prediction by CNN
B. Convolutional Neural Networks
The CNN used in this paper contains a multi-layer neural
network, which consists of input layer, hidden layer, full-
connected layer, and output layer. The hidden layer is composed
of many convolution layers and pooling layers. Each layer of the
network consists of a two-dimensional plane containing a set of
neurons. The implementation process of the CNN is shown in
Fig. 2.
The convolutional layer is composed of various feature
matrices, which can be regarded as a feature extraction layer.
Assume that the original data matrix of the input layer is X, and
the ith layer is the feature map (character matrix) corresponding
to the convolutional layer FMi. The convolution process can be
defined as:
FM i = f ( FM i −1 ⊕ w i + bi )
where, FMi the feature matrix corresponding to the ith
convolutional layer; FMi-1 the feature matrix corresponding to
the (i-1)th convolutional layer; wi the weight matrix
corresponding to the ith convolutional layer; the operator of
convolution; f the activate function.
Fig. 2. The training and prediction process of CNN
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The operation of convolution is shown as (2).
C −1
=  CKil ( j ) X l ( j + j )
l ( rj ) ∗ ∗
yl (i , j ) = CKil ⊕ X (2)
J ∗ =0
*
where, CKil(j ) the j*th weight of ith kernel at lth convolution layer;
Xl(r ) the jth convolution area of lth convolution layer; Xl(j+j*) the
j
character value of jth convolution area of lth convolution layer; C
the kernel width.
The pooling layer connects adjacent convolutional layers
and consists of multiple feature maps. Thus, the convolutional
layer can be considered as the input layer of the pooling layer.
Similarly, the convolution kernel is used to perform sliding
calculation on the convolution layer feature map to obtain the
feature map of the layer. The pooling layer can scale the feature
data of the convolution layer, thereby reducing the feature data
dimension and reducing the computational complexity. At the
same time, the pooling layer can also perform secondary feature
extraction on its feature data. Commonly used pooling
calculation methods include max pooling and average pooling.
In this paper, the method of max pooling is adopted because
it can obtain the eigenvalues that have no positional relationship
with the input feature matrix, and enhance the robustness, which
is defined as follows:
pl ( i , j ) = max ( f l (i ,t ) ) (3)
[( j −i )C +1]≤t ≤ jC
where, f l(i,t) the tth activation value of ith area at lth convolution
layer (the character value in the local area connecting the input
matrix and pooling layer); C the width of pooling layer; pl(i, j) the
output of pooling.
The fully connected layer is connected after multiple
convolutional and pooling layers in the CNN. Each neuron in
the fully connected layer and the neurons in the upper layer are
fully connected, and the characteristic matrix of the
convolutional layer or the pooled layer is spread to obtain the
input feature vector of the fully connected layer, after several
(1) fully connected layers and the entire volume. The output layers
of the neural network are connected to obtain the final CNN
output value. Each neuron between the fully connected layers
also uses an activation function (ReLU, tanh function, etc.) to
improve the performance of CNN.
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 Mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error the limitation of computational burden and training time, model
(RMSE) are adopted as error indexes of RUL prediction. parameters should be quickly and properly adjusted to get the
optimized model. Orthogonal experiment is one of the effective
ˆ
1 n l (i ) − l (i ) (4) methods in searching for main factors without conducting full-
MAE =  l (i )
n i =1 parameter experiments. As expected, the main parameters of
CNN model can be settled.
1 n
RMSE = (l (i) − lˆ(i))2
n i=1
(5) When the structure of CNN is defined, the most influenced
parameters include the segment length, time distance, filter size,
filter number, pooling size, dropout rate and activate function.
C. Optimization of Model Parameters For the data sheet for RUL prediction, the orthogonal table for
The CNN model contains various parameters which have three levels of seven factors is shown in TABLE 1.
influence on the model precision in the training process. Due to
TABLE 1. The plan and range of orthogonal experiments
Activat
Experiment Segmen Time Filter Filter Pooling Dropout Prediction
e
No. t length distance size number size rate accuracy
function
1 200 20 2 50 2 0 ReLU 83.52
2 200 60 6 100 3 0.25 ELU 86.43
3 200 100 10 150 4 0.5 tanh 76.91
4 400 20 2 100 3 0.5 tanh 55.55
5 400 60 6 150 4 0 ReLU 81.51
6 400 100 10 50 2 0.25 ELU 90.20
7 600 20 6 50 4 0.25 tanh 79.17
8 600 60 10 100 2 0.5 ReLU 89.20
9 600 100 2 150 3 0 ELU 87.42
10 200 20 10 150 3 0.25 ReLU 81.62
11 200 60 2 50 4 0.5 ELU 54.18
12 200 100 6 100 2 0 tanh 82.83
13 400 20 6 150 2 0.5 ELU 69.16
14 400 60 10 50 3 0 tanh 88.74
15 400 100 2 100 4 0.25 ReLU 73.16
16 600 20 10 100 4 0 ELU 86.53
17 600 60 2 150 2 0.25 tanh 60.38
18 600 100 6 50 3 0.5 ReLU 90.76
A1 77.58 75.93 69.04 81.10 79.22 85.09 83.30
A2 76.39 76.74 81.64 78.95 81.75 78.49 78.99
A3 82.24 83.55 85.53 76.17 75.24 72.63 72.93
Range 5.86 7.62 16.50 4.93 6.51 12.47 10.37
Influence dropout rate > activate function > filter size (main factors)
ratio > filter number > pooling size > segment length > time distance (secondary factors)

1 n factors should be adjusted firstly, then the secondary factors can

Ak =  Si
k i
R = max { Ak } − min { Ak }
where Sn (n = 1~6) and Ak (k = 1, 2, 3) are the sum value and
mean value of prediction accuracy corresponding to the k level
of factor, respectively; R is the range of Ak.
The range represents the influence ratio of each factor among
all factors. So, the main factors of CNN model are dropout rate,
activate function and filter size. In the training process, the main
(6)
be adapted. Form the results in Table 1, the segment length, time
distance, filter size, filter number, pooling size, dropout rate and
activate function should be selected as 600, 100, 6, 50, 3, 0 and
ReLU, respectively.
III. VALIDATION OF CNN MODEL
Due to the internal relation between discharge curve and
remaining useful life, six characters (Qske, Qdif,tot, Vdis, Qdis,
dQ/dV and dT/dV ) of discharge curve are selected for the data
mining. All the characters are illustrated as: Qske the skewness of
dQ/dV, Qdif,tot the capacity difference between present battery

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and new battery, Vdis the voltage of discharge, Qdis the
discharged capacity, dQ/dV the differential of discharged
capacity to voltage, and dT/dV the differential of battery
temperature to voltage.
The raw data is derived from the reference [1] and reshaped
for the model training of CNN. Details of raw data and
characters are listed in TABLE 2. Battery degrades smoothly
with the increased using cycles, sometimes sharply as shown in
Fig. 3.

Fig. 4. RUL prediction of CNN model

IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a convolutional neural network with optimized
Fig. 3. Capacity fading of raw batteries model parameters is proposed for RUL prediction of lithium
TABLE 2. Data frame of CNN model batteries. The main parameters of model are evaluated as
dropout rate, activate function and filter size. The accuracy of
Parameters RUL prediction exceeds 90.9 percent while RMSE and MAE
Battery ID 41~83 are limited to 35.1 and 13.7, respectively. The proposed method
is suitable for predicting RUL of lithium battery used in EVs and
Voltage range 3.5~2.0V
energy storage device.
Life cycles 400~598
Segment Discharge process Future research interests exist in finding more characters in
battery degradation trajectory, e.g. the character among
Characters Qske, Qdif,tot, Vdis, Qdis, dQ/dV, dT/dV
degradation cycles, and constructing high efficiency and easy-
Linear range 1000 embed model.
Training data 41-69
Training samples 388970 ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Testing data 70-83 This work is financially supported by the National Natural
Testing samples 38570 Science Foundation of China (NSFC, Grant No. 51875339 and
No. 51741707).
The prediction results of RUL are presented in Fig. 4. The
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