The digital battery passport, mandated by the new EU Battery Regulation, will be required from February 2027 for the majority of large batteries placed on the EU market. It comprises 78 static and 19 dynamic attributes designed to characterize and trace the entire battery life cycle—from raw material extraction and manufacturing to usage and recycling.
Implementing this passport—specifically the dynamic attributes, which must be continuously calculated based on individual usage—is a focus of the NEXTBAT project. To address this challenge, we developed a flexible software architecture that can be deployed on the BMS, on an edge control unit, or entirely in the cloud. Its core components are an Aggregator and an Analyzer. The Aggregator processes the continuous stream of measured battery signals into multidimensional matrices, effectively reducing gigabytes of lifetime data to kilobytes or megabytes. Based on these matrices, the Analyzer derives the dynamic battery passport attributes using a stress-map-based capacity prediction model and advanced analytical approximations.
The proposed aggregation and analysis algorithms have been validated using field data from various battery-electric vehicles (including public transportation buses, VW e-Golf, and BMW i3). Furthermore, they have been successfully implemented on the Fraunhofer cloud platform IVImon and an STW control unit. Online dashboards are available to visualize both the regulatory battery passport attributes and comprehensive details of the battery’s usage history. This transparency significantly enhances the basis for critical decision-making, such as determining the optimal path between second-life application and recycling.
The software architecture provides a modular, scalable foundation. It is particularly valuable for SMEs, as it can be easily adapted to the specific requirements of their battery systems, future cell technologies, and any upcoming adjustments to regulatory frameworks (e.g., delegated acts or standardization requests).