Plan-based Policies for Efficient Multiple Battery Load Management
  Efficient use of multiple batteries is a practical problem with wide and
growing application. The problem can be cast as a planning problem under
uncertainty. We describe the approach we have adopted to modelling and solving
this problem, seen as a Markov Decision Problem, building effective policies
for battery switching in the face of stochastic load profiles.
  Our solution exploits and adapts several existing techniques: planning for
deterministic mixed discrete-continuous problems and Monte Carlo sampling for
policy learning. The paper describes the development of planning techniques to
allow solution of the non-linear continuous dynamic models capturing the
battery behaviours. This approach depends on carefully handled discretisation
of the temporal dimension. The construction of policies is performed using a
classification approach and this idea offers opportunities for wider
exploitation in other problems. The approach and its generality are described
in the paper.
  Application of the approach leads to construction of policies that, in
simulation, significantly outperform those that are currently in use and the
best published solutions to the battery management problem. We achieve
solutions that achieve more than 99% efficiency in simulation compared with the
theoretical limit and do so with far fewer battery switches than existing
policies. Behaviour of physical batteries does not exactly match the simulated
models for many reasons, so to confirm that our theoretical results can lead to
real measured improvements in performance we also conduct and report
experiments using a physical test system. These results demonstrate that we can
obtain 5%-15% improvement in lifetimes in the case of a two battery system.
