foxBMS - free and open BMS platform focused on functional safety and AI

Abstract:
The last years have shown a strong market demand for lithium-ion battery systems with higher energy densities, longer lifetimes, and lower costs, but at the same time without compromising safety. To help developers, engineers and researchers worldwide, Fraunhofer IISB has established the free and open source Battery Management System (BMS) development platform ”foxBMS”. The foxBMS platform consists of a modular hardware and software architecture and a complete software development toolchain. Based on the experience providing foxBMS-based solutions to customers and the research community, the next generation of foxBMS is strongly focused on functional safety standards. The hardware architecture and the hardware components themselves help to ensure that functional safety standards are met. Additionally, foxBMS supports a workflow for implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based battery state estimators for the BMS. Using foxBMS as a data generator within this workflow a Neural Network (NN) based on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is trained offline to estimate the state of charge (SOC) based on the current and voltage measurement input. The simulation results, obtained with the trained NN running online on the device, are shown in this paper.