Design of a High Performance Battery Pack as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem

This article presents a new framework for battery pack designs of electric vehicles and demonstrates the benefits with a real case study involving an electric motorcycle. The new approach proposes to define the battery pack as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Instead of manually iterating the designs, the automated process gives the designer the freedom to explore the search space completely. By integrating the concept of hard and soft constraints, it helps to steer the search in the right direction. Mostly understanding where the design can be flexible to choose the best compromise. Moreover, by prioritizing the constraints in the right order, execution time can be reduced significantly. Making the process even faster. When applied to a real case scenario, results show that even if the original design was great, opportunities for improvement were still possible. Also, by understanding which constraints were the most important to prioritize, it would have been much easier to see where optimization in the design would have been the most effective.